Fluorination of Diamond Nanoparticles in Slow Neutron Reflectors Does Not Destroy Their Crystalline Cores and Clustering While Decreasing Neutron Losses

If the wavelength of radiation and the size of inhomogeneities in the medium are approximately equal, the radiation might be intensively scattered in the medium and reflected from its surface. Such efficient nanomaterial reflectors are of great scientific and technological interest. In previous work...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Materials 2020-07, Vol.13 (15), p.3337
Main Authors: Bosak, Alexei, Dideikin, Artur, Dubois, Marc, Ivankov, Oleksandr, Lychagin, Egor, Muzychka, Alexei, Nekhaev, Grigory, Nesvizhevsky, Valery, Nezvanov, Alexander, Schweins, Ralf, Strelkov, Alexander, Vul’, Alexander, Zhernenkov, Kirill
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Atoms & subatomic particles
Chemical Sciences
Clustering
Composite materials
Crystal structure
Crystallinity
Diamonds
Fluorination
Fluorine
Hybridization
Material chemistry
Nanomaterials
Nanoparticles
Nanospheres
Nanostructure
Neutron scattering
Neutrons
Nuclear Experiment
Nuclear Theory
Physics
Reflectors
Studies
Thermal neutrons
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Summary:If the wavelength of radiation and the size of inhomogeneities in the medium are approximately equal, the radiation might be intensively scattered in the medium and reflected from its surface. Such efficient nanomaterial reflectors are of great scientific and technological interest. In previous works, we demonstrated a significant improvement in the efficiency of reflection of slow neutrons from a powder of diamond nanoparticles by replacing hydrogen located on the surface of nanoparticles with fluorine and removing the residual sp2 amorphous shells of nanoparticles via the fluorination process. In this paper, we study the mechanism of this improvement using a set of complementary experimental techniques. To analyze the data on a small-angle scattering of neutrons and X-rays in powders of diamond nanoparticles, we have developed a model of discrete-size diamond nanospheres. Our results show that fluorination does not destroy either the crystalline cores of nanoparticles or their clustering in the scale range of 0.6–200 nm. This observation implies that it does not significantly affect the neutron scattering properties of the powder. We conclude that the overall increase in reflectivity from the fluorinated nanodiamond powder is primarily due to the large reduction of neutron losses in the powder caused by the removal of hydrogen contaminations.
ISSN:1996-1944
1996-1944
DOI:10.3390/ma13153337