Complex Materials Scattering (CMS) Beamline at NSLS II: Recent Developments and Progress toward Autonomous Exploration of Material Structure

The CMS beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II provides small- and wide-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS) capabilities for materials science community. Since 2017, CMS has been supporting user experiments involving a wide range of materials, from polymers, nanocomposites, liquid crystals, biomolecular materials, to self-assembled nanoparticle superlattices and lithographic nanostructures. To promote efficient exploration of material parameter spaces, CMS has implemented a variety of high-throughput and in-situ capabilities. Besides basic transmission and grazing-incidence (GI)SAXS/WAXS capabilities, CMS has demonstrated, and offers, technically demanding capabilities such as specular reflectivity, variable-angle methods (CD-SAXS/CD-GISAXS), and grazing-incidence scattering tomography. We will discuss these developments as well as our recent progress with implementing autonomous x-ray scattering experiments in which decision-making algorithms are integrated into a closed-loop beamline workflow pipeline.