How molecular solids prepare for phase transitions: The phase transition in oxalyl chloride

DOI

Oxalyl chloride, which is a liquid at RT, forms a disordered phase (I) on cooling to 260 K. This phase is unstable with respect to an ordered phase (II) below 250 K, but in practice, phase I may be super-cooled to 2 K, and we have determined the crystal structure of both phases I and II at this temperature. When phase-II is warmed from 2 K up to the melting point its volume shows ideal Debye behaviour until 100 K. Above this temperature there is a departure from ideality, the deviation becoming progressively larger up to the II to I transition at 250 K. It appears that the sample is ¿preparing¿ to transform, possibly through enhanced, correlated whole-molecule vibrations. We aim to carry out PDF measurements to characterise the development of disorder in phase-II as it approaches the transition. PDF data will also be collected on phase-I with the aim of detecting local order.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.24078927
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/24078927
Provenance
Creator Professor Martin Dove; Professor Andrew Goodwin; Professor Simon Parsons; Mr Nick Funnell; Dr Richard Ibberson; Professor Stewart Parker; Dr Matthew Tucker
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2012
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Photon- and Neutron Geosciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2009-12-03T06:57:16Z
Temporal Coverage End 2009-12-16T07:49:35Z