Polymers provide the essential infrastructure to our everyday life.
Their special properties have been exploited in just about all areas of technology, from clothing and packaging through to structural materials and data storage media. Their enormous versatility comes in part from their structures - they may be amorphous, crystalline, liquid crystalline, or a mixture of these. The key to understanding and controlling the applications properties of polymers comes from defining the link between those properties and the structures which give rise to them, at atomic and molecular and at larger length scales. Conventional diffraction studies help in the case of crystalline polymers, but these are very much in a minority. In blends and in amorphous solid systems, structure must be characterised by some more specialised techniques such as those available at a synchrotron source.