The structure of dense fluid deuterium

DOI

It is partly due to quantum effects that hydrogen (and deuterium) exhibits a dramatic compressibility: in its fluid state, prior to freezing at room temperature at 5.5 GPa, it experiences a volume reduction by a factor of 3. This huge compressibility raises the interesting prospect of using a structural measurement of the fluid to sample the, intermolecular interaction potential across an extremely wide range of molecular separations. Such an experiment is now feasible, on deuterium, using newly developed gas loading techniques, and we propose to measure the structure of the fluid up to 5.5 GPa. This measurement would also provide a determination of the D-D molecular bondlength which is currently unknown above ambient pressure. Due to orientational disorder, this cannot be determined by conventional crystallographic means.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.73940357
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/73940357
Provenance
Creator Dr Craig Bull; Dr Malcolm Guthrie; Dr Stefan Klotz
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2019
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 Chemistry; Natural Sciences; Physics
Temporal Coverage Begin 2016-03-17T10:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2016-03-23T10:00:00Z