LAUSR

Abstract At grazing incidence, neutrons are reflected by a flat smooth surface. Neutron reflectivity is known as a promising tool for precise and non-destructive analysis of buried layers and interfaces of thin films. On the other hand, studying inhomogeneous samples, which is quite often the case in practice with thin films, has been a big challenge, mainly because of the difficulty in obtaining a small neutron beam without significant intensity loss. The present research examines an alternative efficient way to provide spatial resolution in neutron reflectivity without the use of any micro beam and/or any high-resolution position sensitive neutron detector. It has been demonstrated for the first time that the reflectogram, which is a projection at grazing incidence along a neutron's propagation direction, can be obtained by use of a Hadamard coded mask and a conventional point detector such as a 3He detector. This suggests that neutron reflectivity imaging will be realized by collecting further reflectograms as a function of in-plane rotation angles.