X-ray diffraction of metastable structures from supercooled liquid hydrogen

Luke B Fletcher; Abraham L Levitan; Emma E McBride; Jongjin B Kim; Eduardo P Alves; Andrew Aquila; Mungo Frost; Sebastian Goede; Grace King; Thomas J Lane; Mengning Liang; Michael J MacDonald; Benjamin K Ofori-Okai; Christopher Schönwälder; Peihao Sun; Jerome B Hastings; Sebastien Boutet; Siegfried H Glenzer

doi:10.1038/s41598-024-67942-6

X-ray diffraction of metastable structures from supercooled liquid hydrogen

Sci Rep. 2024 Jul 27;14(1):17283. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-67942-6.

Authors

Luke B Fletcher¹, Abraham L Levitan^{2

3}, Emma E McBride^{2

4}, Jongjin B Kim², Eduardo P Alves^{2

5}, Andrew Aquila², Mungo Frost², Sebastian Goede^{2

4}, Grace King², Thomas J Lane², Mengning Liang², Michael J MacDonald^{6

7}, Benjamin K Ofori-Okai², Christopher Schönwälder^{2

8}, Peihao Sun^{2

9}, Jerome B Hastings², Sebastien Boutet², Siegfried H Glenzer²

Affiliations

¹ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA. [email protected].
² SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA.
³ Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
⁴ European XFEL GmbH, 22869, Schenefeld, Germany.
⁵ Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
⁶ Department of Physics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁷ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, 94550, USA.
⁸ Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91054, Erlangen, Germany.
⁹ Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.

Abstract

We report time resolved observations of the crystallization from liquid hydrogen, supercooled to temperatures below the melting point, using 11.2 keV X-ray diffraction from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). Changes to the metastable solid and liquid structure factors have been dynamically measured. This allows for a direct determination of the lowest energy crystal polymorphs, the stacking probabilities, as well as the liquid and solid densities and temperatures. Such measurements provide experimental evidence of an Arrhenius-like growth kinetics along the stacking direction during supercooling.

Keywords: Hydrogen crystallization; Stacking faults; Supercool; X-ray diffraction.

Grants and funding

FWP 100182/Department of Energy, Office of Science, Fusion Energy Science