Electrochemical Redox Couples: A Modulation excitation study

Knowing the structure and properties of materials including liquids are essential to understand their impact on many aspects of our life and environment. Neutron scattering techniques provide information ranging from magnetism, superconductivity to physical and chemical properties. In a typical experiment, neutrons interact exclusively with nucleus of an atom (which scatter neutrons) and hence the scattering power of an atom is not related to an atomic number, unlike other techniques such as X-rays. This has advantages: i) easy to study light atoms such as hydrogen and ii) the nuclear dependence of scattering allows to study with isotopic labelling. However, neutron scattering is not sensitive and hence requires high amounts of sample. To overcome this, we propose to employ modulation excitation methods to increase the sensitivity of the techniques.

了解包括液体在内的材料的结构与性质，对于理解它们在人类生活和环境诸多方面的影响至关重要。中子散射技术可提供涵盖磁性、超导性乃至物理与化学性质的信息。在典型实验中，中子仅与原子的原子核（散射中子的部分）相互作用，因此原子的散射能力与原子序数无关——这与X射线等其他技术不同。该特性具有两大优势：其一，易于研究氢等轻原子；其二，散射的核依赖性使得同位素标记研究成为可能。然而，中子散射的灵敏度较低，因此需要大量样品。为解决这一问题，我们提出采用调制激发方法以提升该技术的灵敏度。