ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

Time resolved studies of the effect of cyanide order on phonon softening in the cubic NTE material Cd(CN)2

Abstract: Materials which exhibit negative thermal expansion (NTE) are used in a number of applications to counteract the usual positive thermal expansion (PTE) of ordinary materials. Cubic cadmium cyanide is amongst the most important isotropic NTE materials with behaviour more than twice as extreme as that of better known systems such as ZrW2O8. Despite its importance, little is understood about lattice dynamics of Cd(CN)2; this is partly because the orientations of the molecular CN anion exhibit correlated disorder of a kind which has only recently been characterised. Our hypothesis is that CN orientational disorder affects the lattice dynamics responsible for NTE in Cd(CN)2. By studying the time-evolution of the inelastic neutron scattering after an abrupt cooling step, we will be able to extract the effect of long-timescale CN reorientations on the vibrational modes responsible from NTE.

Principal Investigator: Professor Andrew Goodwin
Local Contact: Dr Helen Walker
Experimenter: Dr Anthony Phillips
Experimenter: Mr Johnathan Bulled
Experimenter: Dr Chloe Coates
Experimenter: Dr Arianna Minelli
Experimenter: Mr Philip Welch

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2010577

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2010577

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
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Data Citation

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

For Example:
Professor Andrew Goodwin et al; (2020): Time resolved studies of the effect of cyanide order on phonon softening in the cubic NTE material Cd(CN)2, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2010577

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