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Figure 1
(a) Patterned (apertured) chips contain a regular array of blind recesses or cavitied apertures where crystals can locate. These wells fix the raster-scan step sizes (Δy and Δx) of the well array. The separating walls between the localization wells tend to shield unexposed crystals from shockwaves, heat, radicals and gas generated produced by previous X-ray exposures. (b) In SOS chips the crystals are randomly distributed within a thin film sealed between two stretched polymer foils. Since crystals need not funnel into structured features, there are no limits on crystal size and only minor considerations regarding media; this makes SOS chips uniquely suited for investigations using true nanocrystals or membrane-protein crystals grown in LCP. Moreover, scan-step sizes within and between individual scan lines can be chosen freely. Since the raster-scan directions (up–down versus side-to-side) vary from one facility to the next, it is useful to denote them as inter-line or fast (here Δy) and intra-line or slow (here Δx). (c) Schematic illustrating radiation damage spreading in a step-by-step periodic exposure of a SOS chip (Doak et al., 2024View full citation). Shown are one full downwards scan of exposures 1 to N in steps of Δy, followed by a horizontal step of Δy = Δx and the few first exposures of the upwards return scan from N + 1 to 2N + 1 (blue arrows). Here, damage is represented simply as spreading at constant radial speed with the increment Δy and the time between exposures are chosen such that damage spreads by only Δy/10 in the time between exposures. If actual diffusion constants are available, quite accurate calculations can easily be carried out (see, for example, the Supporting Information for X-ray-induced heating/gas diffusion). The motion diagrams are for the beamtimes at Cristallina-MX; the fast and slow axes are switched for ID29.

IUCrJ
Volume 12| Part 6| November 2025| Pages 692-709
ISSN: 2052-2525
https://doi.org/10.1107/S2052252525008371