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This study introduces a novel method for generating ultrathin surface-attached liquid sheets that enhance the temporal resolution and signal-to-noise ratio in grazing-incidence X-ray scattering experiments. By utilizing an impinging-jet geometry and gas-assisted shaping, the researchers successfully created stable liquid sheets with a thickness below 500 nm, enabling access to ultrafast structural dynamics at the solid-liquid interface. The findings demonstrate that these sheets can significantly improve the characterization of interfacial processes relevant to catalysis and chemical reactions.
Achieving submicrometer thickness in liquid sheets opens the door to unprecedented insights into ultrafast interfacial dynamics.
Capturing the ultrafast structural dynamics that occur at the solid-liquid interface is key to understanding adsorption, desorption, diffusion, and aggregation processes in catalysis and interfacial chemical reactions. Hard-X-ray scattering in grazing-incidence geometry can, in principle, access interfacial structural changes with angstrom-scale structural sensitivity and ultrafast temporal resolution. However, the long optical paths of the optical pump and hard-X-ray pulses inside the liquid sample pose significant challenges to the temporal resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and overall stability of such an experimental scheme. Here, we report a method for creating and characterizing ultrathin surface-attached free-flowing liquid sheets, whose submicrometer thickness enables ultrafast temporal resolution and reduces the bulk-liquid scattering contribution. The impinging-jet geometry produces stable micrometer-scale sheets whose morphology depends systematically on incidence angle, jet velocity, and capillary diameter. Gas-assisted shaping using a second capillary further narrows and thins the sheet, producing an extended ultrathin region and reducing the measured minimum thickness below 500~nm for acetonitrile. The resulting platform provides a reproducible, continuously flowing, surface-attached liquid geometry for grazing-incidence scattering experiments.
Stanford HAI