Determining Hydration Level in Self-Assembled Structures Using Contrast Variation Small Angle Neutron Scattering

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, model-free method using contrast variation small angle neutron scattering to quantitatively determine hydration and polymer distributions in self-assembled nanostructures, exemplified by spherical micelles.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical, hypothesis-free approach for evaluating hydration levels in soft matter structures via neutron scattering.

Findings

Intra-particle hydration can be determined from scattering data

Polymer distribution within micelles can be quantified

Method is simple and model-free

Abstract

We outline a strategy for quantitatively evaluating the conformational characteristics of self-assembled structures using the techniques of contrast variation small angle neutron scattering. By means of basis function expansion, a case study of spherical micelles demonstrates that the intra-particle hydration and polymer distributions can be determined from the coherent scattering intensity in a model-free manner. Our proposed approach is simple, analytical and does not require a presumptive hypothesis of scattering function as an input in data analysis. The successful implementation of the proposed approach opens the prospect of quantifying the nanoscale complexity of soft matter using neutron scattering.