ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

The structure of dense fluid deuterium

Abstract: 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.

Principal Investigator: Dr Malcolm Guthrie
Experimenter: Dr Craig Bull
Experimenter: Dr Stefan Klotz

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB1510331

ISIS Experiment Number: RB1510331

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
Select the data format above to find out more about it.

Data Citation

The recommended format for citing this dataset in a research publication is as:
[author], [date], [title], [publisher], [doi]

For Example:
Dr Malcolm Guthrie et al; (2015): The structure of dense fluid deuterium, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB1510331

Data is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license.