SOLEIL a new powerful tool for materials science

The first photons delivered by the third generation synchrotron source SOLEIL will be soon available for the scientific community. In this context, this paper presents an overview of the potentialities offered by this new machine for the study of materials. The outstanding brilliance of the SOLEIL source will enable to reduce by several orders of magnitude the data collection time for most of the synchrotron techniques (X-ray absorption spectroscopy - EXAFS, wide and small angle X-ray scattering - WAXS and SAXS, X-ray diffraction - XRD, photoelectron spectroscopy and microscopy-XPS and PEEM, etc.) thus allowing an operando approach of catalysis processes. The spatial resolution, from a few micrometers to sub micrometer scale, accessible by microdiffraction and microspectroscopy in the wavelength range from the far IR to the hard X-rays, will provide spatial distributions of different elements (atomic and chemical state selectivity) in a material, from the working heterogeneous catalyst to the reservoir rocks. The reactivity of surfaces and nanoparticles exposed to controlled gas fluxes will be studied by several in situ techniques. Finally the combination of different synchrotron techniques (diffraction, absorption and fluorescence X) and the access to complementary information obtained through the simultaneous combinations of these techniques with those routinely applied in Materials Science, such as UV-Vis or Raman spectroscopy, will offer enlarged capabilities for the operando characterization of materials.