1. Zero-Background Scatterless Hybrid Slits for Synchrotron and In-house SAXS Applications Cyrus R. Safinya, University of California-Santa Barbara, DMR 0619171 The newly developed scatterless single crystal/metal hybrid slits greatly improves performance in synchrotron and in-house SAXS instruments. The hybrid slit produces no detrimental slit scattering commonly associated with conventional metal slits, leading to a much simplified SAXS design and greater performance in terms of flux and resolution. In both synchrotron and in-house experiments, the use of the scatterless slits has led to ~3X improvement in usable photon flux at sample position without compromising resolution. The scatterless slit is been adopted by several synchrotron SAXS beamlines and is likely to become a standard feature in SAXS design. The dramatic performance enhancement resulting from the scatterless slits technology, and its low cost (at a fraction of the total instrument cost) has generated broad and rapid interest in the SAXS community and is been incorporated at several synchrotron beamlines around the world (e.g. ESRF, ALS, SSRL). The general scatterless design concept can be used to significantly boost the performance of a large number of existing SAXS instruments. Fig. (A, B) Vacuum compatible scatterless slits developed at UCSB for synchrotron and in-house SAXS. (C) 2D SAXS background taken at ESRF beamline D2RM showing complete elimination of slit scattering (streaks in image a) when the scatterless slits were used (b). A simplified SAXS design results in 3X more flux without compromising resolution (c ). AB Reference: Y. Li, R. Beck, T. Huang, M.C. Choi, M. Divinagraci, “Scatterless Hybrid Metal-Single Crystal Slit for Small Angle X-ray Scattering and High-resolution X-ray Diffraction”, J. Appl. Cryst. 42, 1134-1139 (2008) B C HYBRID SCATTERLESS SLITS X-RAY BEAM AB C SLIT SCATTERING

2. MRI: Development of an Ultra-High Resolution Small Angle X-Ray Scattering Instrument for Characterizing Supramolecular Assemblies Cyrus R. Safinya, University of California-Santa Barbara, DMR 0619171 Broader Impact: The newly developed scatterless slits for SAXS is gaining wide interest in the SAXS community and we are collaborating with scientists at several synchrotron SAXS facilities in the world (incl. ESRF, ALS & SSRL) to implement this new technology, which can lead to significant enhancement in SAXS capability for broad areas of research. Education: The participants including undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are educated in x-ray instrumentation science and SAXS methods for nanoscale characterization of supramolecular assemblies. PICTURED (TOP RIGHT): UCSB undergraduate research assistants Gabriel Harmon and Kyle Peterson, who are participants in the project, working on the in-house SAXS instrument. Outreach: The PI’s participate in multiple outreach programs at UCSB for undergraduate and high school teacher research internships. We actively recruit and encourage undergraduate students to work on this project to gain valuable first hand research experience. PICTURED (BOTTOM RIGHT): RISE intern Thomas (Tuo) Huang (Grinnell College, Iowa) who was mentored by co-PI Li, presents his work in a poster. Inspired by his research experience, Thomas is currently pursuing graduate study at Northwestern University.