Abstract
Neutron diffraction and spectroscopy offer unique insight into structures and properties of solids and molecular materials. All neutron instruments located at the various neutron sources are distinct, even if their designs are based on similar principles, and thus, they are usually less familiar to the community than commercial X-ray diffractometers and optical spectrometers. Major neutron instruments in the USA, which are open to scientists around the world, and examples of their use in coordination chemistry research are presented here, along with a list of similar instruments at main neutron facilities in other countries. The reader may easily and quickly find from this minireview an appropriate neutron instrument for research. The instruments include single-crystal and powder diffractometers to determine structures, inelastic neutron scattering (INS) spectrometers to probe magnetic and vibrational excitations, and quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) spectrometers to study molecular dynamics such as methyl rotation on ligands. Key and unique features of the diffraction and neutron spectroscopy that are relevant to inorganic chemistry are reviewed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1065-1089 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry |
| Volume | 2019 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 28 2019 |
Funding
The authors thank financial support by the US National Science Foundation (CHE-1633870 to Z-L. X.). Acknowledgment is also made to the Donors of the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund for partial support of this work. The research at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor was sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy. The computing and software resources were made available through funding by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at ORNL of the VirtuES: Virtual Experiments in Spectroscopy (LDRD 7739) and the ICE-MAN: Integrated Computational Environment, Modeling and Analysis of Neutron data (LDRD 8237) projects. The authors thank Dr. Shelby E. Stavretis for making Scheme 3. Huibo Cao studied single-molecule magnets as a graduate student at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, and received his PhD degree in condensed matter physics in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Qiwei Yan. Then, he did his first postdoctoral work with Dr. Isabelle Mirebeau and Dr. Arsen Goukassov at Laboratoire Léon Brillouin, CEA, Saclay, France, for two years in studying the frustrated magnetism by neutron scattering. Dr. Cao came to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to work on the HB-3A, a four-circle single crystal neutron diffractometer at High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) with Dr. Bryan Chakoumakos and soon became a staff scientist at ORNL. He won a 2018 Early Career Research Program award from the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, for his proposal, “Local Site Magnetic Susceptibility for Quantum Materials by Polarized Neutron Diffraction”. His current interest is in studying competing interactions and frustration of magnetic systems.
Keywords
- Inelastic neutron scattering (INS)
- Neutron instruments
- Quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS)
- Structure elucidation