Setup for in situ x-ray diffraction study of swift heavy ion irradiated materials

An in situ x-ray diffraction (XRD) setup is designed and installed in the materials science beam line of the Pelletron accelerator at the Inter-University Accelerator Centre for in situ studies of phase change in swift heavy ion irradiated materials. A high vacuum chamber with suitable windows for incident and diffracted X-rays is integrated with the goniometer and the beamline. Indigenously made liquid nitrogen (LN2) temperature sample cooling unit is installed. The snapshots of growth of particles with fluence of 90 MeV Ni ions were recorded using in situ XRD experiment, illustrating the potential of this in situ facility. A thin film of C60 was used to test the sample cooling unit. It shows that the phase of the C60 film transforms from a cubic lattice (at room temperature) to a fcc lattice at around T=255 K.