Laue Diffraction of Single-crystalline Graphite Intercalation Compounds

We propose to use neutron scattering to study the crystal structures of a group of intercalated layered materials, i.e. graphite intercalation compounds (GIC). Via a task-specific synthesis approach, these GIC crystals show high single crystallinity and interesting quantum phenomena (i.e. monolayer-behaving bulk materials with superlattice modulation). Of particular note is that the intercalants are made of light elements, making neutron scattering the most suitable tool for studying their spatial ordering, whereas X-ray diffraction techniques are not as capable of fully resolving the lattice formed by the light elements. The neutron scattering results are critical to understanding the observed quantum phenomena by computational methods. We expect that the results from the this study could provide new insights on synthesizing and understanding monolayer-behaving bulk materials.