The spontaneous formation of chiral structures offers a variety of liquid crystals LC phases that could be further tailored for practical applications. In our work, the characteristic features of spiral ordering in the cholesteric phase of EZL10 10 LC were evaluated. To disclose resonant reflections related to a nanoscale helix pitch, resonant soft X ray scattering at the carbon K edge was employed. The angular positions of the observed element specific scattering peaks reveal a half pitch of the spiral ordering p 2 amp; 8776; 52 nm indicating the full pitch of about 104 nm at room temperature. The broadening of the peaks points to a presence of coherently scattering finite size domains formed by cholesteric spirals with lengths of about five pitches. No scattering peaks were detectable in the EZL10 10 isotropic phase at higher temperatures. The characteristic lengths extracted from the resonant soft X ray scattering experiment agree well with the periodicity of the surface fingerprint pattern observed in the EZL10 10 cholesteric phase by means of atomic force microscopy. The stability of LC molecules under the incident beam was proven by X ray absorption spectroscopy in transmission geometry
