Shinohara Yuya, Ivanov Alexander S, Maltsev Dmitry, Granroth Garrett E, Abernathy Douglas L, Dai Sheng, Egami Takeshi
Materials Science and Technology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, United States.
Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, United States.
J Phys Chem Lett. 2022 Jun 30;13(25):5956-5962. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c01230. Epub 2022 Jun 23.
Molten inorganic salts are attracting resurgent attention because of their unique physicochemical properties, making them promising media for next-generation concentrating solar power systems and molten salt reactors. The dynamics of these highly disordered ionic media is largely studied by theoretical simulations, while the robust experimental techniques capable of observing local dynamics are not well-developed. To provide fundamental insights into the atomic-scale transport properties of molten salts, we report the real-space dynamics of molten magnesium chloride at high temperatures employing the Van Hove correlation function obtained by inelastic neutron scattering. Our results directly depict the distance-dependent dynamics of a molten salt on the picosecond time scale. This study demonstrates the capability of the developed approach to describe the locally correlated- and self-dynamics in molten salts, significantly improving our understanding of the interplay between microscopic structural parameters and their dynamics that ultimately control physical properties of condensed matter in extreme environments.
熔融无机盐因其独特的物理化学性质而重新受到关注，这使其成为下一代聚光太阳能发电系统和熔盐反应堆的有前景的介质。这些高度无序的离子介质的动力学主要通过理论模拟进行研究，而能够观测局部动力学的强大实验技术尚未得到充分发展。为了深入了解熔盐的原子尺度传输性质，我们利用非弹性中子散射获得的范霍夫关联函数，报道了高温下熔融氯化镁的实空间动力学。我们的结果直接描绘了熔盐在皮秒时间尺度上与距离相关的动力学。这项研究证明了所开发方法描述熔盐中局部关联动力学和自动力学的能力，显著增进了我们对微观结构参数与其动力学之间相互作用的理解，而这种相互作用最终控制着极端环境中凝聚态物质的物理性质。
