ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

The orientational disordered phase of crystalline oxygen

Abstract: The first crystal structure formed by freezing molecular oxygen contains a lot of orientational disorder. Given the considerable interest in the solid phases of oxygen across both temperature and pressure, it is long overdue that the orientational disorder should be properly understood. Actually, whereas many simple molecular crystals have one molecule per lattice point, the unit cell of the disordered phase of oxygen has two distinct sites for the molecules of quite different symmetry. The best approach to understand orientational disorder in crystals is using a combination of neutron total scattering with analysis using the Reverse Monte Carlo method. This is what we propose here, giving us the first detailed understanding of orientational disorder in solid oxygen.

Principal Investigator: Professor Martin Dove
Experimenter: Dr Zhongsheng Wei
Experimenter: Professor Anthony Phillips
Experimenter: Professor David Keen
Experimenter: Mr LI LEI
Experimenter: Miss Xinyu Zhao
Experimenter: Dr guanqun cai
Local Contact: Dr Gabriel Perez

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2510276

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2510276

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 Martin Dove et al; (2026): The orientational disordered phase of crystalline oxygen, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2510276

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