Structural Characterization of Perpendicularly Aligned Submicrometer-Thick Synthetic Glycolipid Polycrystalline Films Using Conventional X-ray Diffraction

The structural analysis of the synthetic glycolipid crystalline phase has been performed during the past few decades; however, it has not been sufficiently understood in terms of both static and dynamic aspects. We have recently shown that grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) affords better information than conventional powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) for the crystal structure analysis of octyl β-D-galactoside (MOβGal) using sub-micrometer-thick crystalline films and a two-dimensional detector, together with a synchrotron radiation source. However, access to this technique is not universal because of the limited machine time at the required synchrotron radiation sources. Herein, we employed XRD analysis on MOβGal hemihydrate crystalline films using commercial X-ray sources instead of synchrotron radiation sources to extend the availability of the methodology. We investigated some technical aspects of the methodology, such as incident angle and radiation time, using MOβGal polycrystalline films with different thicknesses in order to obtain sufficient reciprocal data for identifying the lattice constants with conventional X-ray sources. Complementary uses of GIXD with a two-dimensional detector, with much higher incident angles than the total reflection angle using a NANO-Viewer system and out-of-plane and in-plane measurements using SmartLab, enabled us to determine the complete lattice parameters for the MOβGal hemihydrate crystalline film.