DYNAMICS OF IONIC LIQUIDS AT THE PHASE TRANSITIONS BY SIMULTANEOUS QENS AND DSC MEASUREMENTS

Ionic liquids (ILs) attract wide attention due to their unique properties distinguishing them from all other liquids, enormous variety of available ILs, and tunability of their physical and chemical properties and response to specific stimuli. The IL dynamics is complex due to their sophisticates self-assembled structure resulting from a delicate balance between various interactions. Many ILs undergo complex phase transitions (crystal-crystal, melting-crystallization or glass transition) at operation temperatures. Quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) combined with a direct following of the phase transitions by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) is a unique method to resolve the relation between the IL dynamics and nanostructure. Simultaneous QENS and DSC experiments have just become available at IRIS spectrometer, and our aim consists of using these techniques to investigate the molecular motions in three bulk ILs of different molecular structure, undergoing melting, crystal-crystal, or glass transitions. To aid the data analysis and correlate the dynamics with structure, we aim to use I11 X-Ray diffraction beamline at Diamond.