Molecular jiggling may explain why some solids shrink when heated

When things heat up, most
solids expand as higher temperatures cause atoms to vibrate more dramatically,
necessitating more space. But some solid crystals, like scandium fluoride,
shrink when heated —
a phenomenon called negative thermal expansion.

Now, by measuring distances
between atoms in scandium fluoride crystals, scientists think that they have
figured out how that shrinkage happens. While the bonds between scandium and
fluorine stay fixed when heated, the fluorine atoms in the crystal are free to
wiggle around a bit. That mix of rigidity and flexibility causes the crystal’s sides to buckle, the researchers report online November 1 in Scientific Advances.

“Some of the biggest
challenges in our field have to do with answering questions about solids” with
structures similar to scandium fluoride, says Jason Hancock, a physicist at the
University of Connecticut in Storrs, who was not involved in the study. Solving
the mystery of negative thermal expansion in scandium fluoride may help
physicists understand more about similar materials, such as copper-based superconductors, which transmit electricity without resistance but
still at temperatures too low to be of much practical use (SN: 12/8/17).

Scandium fluoride “is the
simplest material where this phenomenon was present in full strength, and that
allowed us to disentangle what actually is happening,” says Igor Zaliznyak, a
physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. The molecular
jiggling that allows scandium fluoride to shrink is probably similar in other
materials, Zaliznyak says.

The team figured out the
mechanism using a technique called total neutron diffraction. The researchers
bombarded scandium fluoride with a beam of neutrons and recorded how the subatomic
particles bounced off of the crystals at temperatures up to 1,100 kelvins
(about 827°
Celsius). By analyzing the scattering patterns, the scientists calculated the likely
distances between pairs of atoms.

The distance between scandium and fluorine atoms was roughly the same when heated, implying that the chemical bond between the two is rigid. The same proved true for spacing between individual scandium atoms. But there was a huge range of distances between fluorine atoms, indicating that their positions in the crystal’s atomic lattice are more flexible. This combination of fixed and variable distances between atoms, the researchers say, keeps the crystal roughly in its cubic shape while allowing its sides to buckle and compress.