Wide-angle diamond cell for neutron scattering

ABSTRACT

A new diamond cell with extreme apertures is described. It is tailored for a large variety of neutron scattering techniques such as inelastic neutron scattering and single-crystal diffraction both at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and the High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Simple springs enable forces of over 10 metric tons to be clamped in for low-temperature measurements. At present, low-cost polycrystalline diamond (Versimax^®) pressure anvils are used. We predict a routine pressure regime up to 20 GPa with sample volumes of ∼0.5 mm³. Future use of large CVD single-crystal diamond anvils will significantly expand this pressure range. We show examples for measurements at the SNAP, VISION and CORELLI beamlines of the SNS.

KEYWORDS:

• High pressure neutron scattering
• diamond anvil cell
• inelastic neutron scattering

Acknowledgements

The authors most gratefully acknowledge Mark Loguillo and Matt Rucker (Sample Environment High Pressure Group, Neutron Sciences, ORNL) for help with pressurization during the CORELLI experiment, J.-Q. Yan (ORNL/University of Tennessee, Knoxville) for providing us with the single crystals of MnP, Malcolm Guthrie (European Spallation Source, Lund, Sweden) for discussions on the ice measurements and Yan Wu and Huibo Cao (Four-Circle diffractometer, HFIR, Neutron Sciences, ORNL) for the HFIR DAC experiments. The authors also acknowledge Shanmin Wang (Southern University of Science & Technology, Shenzhen, P.R. China) for the gasket transmission measurements on VISION. This work was conducted at the SNAP, VISION and CORELLI beamlines of the Spallation Neutron Source, a DoE Office of Science User Facility operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The development of the cell was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Batelle LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy. Work by RB was partially supported by the Energy Frontier Research in Extreme Environments (EFree) Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under award number DE-SC0001057.