Synchrotron radiation glancing incidence X-ray diffraction: a tool for structural investigations of ion implanted glasses

The availability of very intense and highly collimated synchrotron radiation beams coupled with the glancing incidence geometry makes possible to study ion implanted glasses with X-ray diffraction. We maximize the contribution to the scattering of the metal-rich (clusters) layer by working at the critical angle for total external reflection at the implanted layer-substrate interface. By using the refracted beam as a probe the diffraction profile of the metallic clusters in very diluted samples (a single implant in the 10(16) at/cm(2) range) can be extracted. We report some results on SiO2 glasses implanted with Cu and Ni. We used a very intense monochromatic 10(h)x24(v) mu m(2) beam from an undulator source. The data were collected by using an imaging plate (IP) system with integration times in the order of minutes. From the azimuthal integration of the images the clusters diffraction pattern can be extracted enabling crystalline phases identification, the retrieval of the lattice parameters and in some cases the determination of the clusters sizes.