Analyzing Anisotropic Structure in Soft Materials from Small Angle Scattering Profiles

Structural anisotropy can be found in nature, for example in tissues, or in synthetic soft materials with anisotropic building blocks (e.g., liquid crystals) and/or upon being processed (e.g., extrusion). Characterizing the structural anisotropy in the three-dimensions can be quite complicated and requires sophisticated imaging techniques like tomography or cryogenic-transmission electron microscopy. Small angle scattering techniques can therefore be used to analyze three-dimensional structure over multiple length scales. The information pertaining to anisotropy requires the interpretation of 2D scattering profiles, for which analysis methods to extract extent of orientational order are often limited. Previous work in our group led to the development of 'Computational Reverse Engineering Analysis for Scattering Experiments' (CREASE) method to identify relevant length-scales in isotropic structures and reconstruct their three-dimensional structure. In this talk we will demonstrate the steps we have taken to extend CREASE to analyze 2D scattering profiles and quantify a) the distribution of sizes and shapes of anisotropic structural elements (i.e., building blocks or domains they form) and b) orientational and positional ordering of these structural elements within the soft material.