A high temperature high pressure cell for quasielastic neutron scattering.

We present our recent development of a high temperature high pressure cell for neutron scattering. Combining a water cooled Nb1Zr pressure cell body with an internal heating furnace, the sample environment can reach temperatures of up to 1500 K at a pressure of up to 200 MPa at the sample position, with an available sample volume of about 700 mm(3). The cell material Nb1Zr is specifically chosen due to its reasonable mechanical strength at elevated temperatures and fairly small neutron absorption and incoherent scattering cross sections. With this design, an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio of about 10:1 can be achieved. This opens new possibilities for quasielastic neutron scattering studies on different types of neutron spectrometers under high temperature high pressure conditions, which is particularly interesting for geological research on, e.g., water dynamics in silicate melts.