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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Synthesis and Exfoliation of Discotic Zirconium Phosphates to Obtain Colloidal Liquid Crystals
Published on: May 25, 2016
The crystal structure of Zr2NiD4.5
M H Sørby1, A E Gunnaes, O M Løvvik
1Institute for Energy Technology, PO Box 40, NO-2027 Kjeller, Norway. magnuss@ife.no
Abstract:
The crystal structure of Zr2NiD4.5 has been determined by a combination of synchrotron radiation powder X-ray diffraction, electron diffraction and powder neutron diffraction data. Deuterium ordering results in a triclinic supercell given by asuper=6.81560 (7), bsuper=8.85137 (9), csuper=8.88007 (10) A, alphasuper=79.8337 (8), betasuper=90.0987 (9), gammasuper=90.3634 (9) degrees, which relates to the non-super unit cell as asuper=-a, bsuper=-b-c, csuper=-b+c. The centrosymmetric and fully ordered deuterium sublattice was determined by simulated annealing and Rietveld refinement. Deuterium was found to occupy three types of tetrahedral sites: two that are coordinated by four Zr atoms and one that is coordinated by three Zr atoms and one Ni atom. All D-D distances are longer than 2 A. The feasibility of the crystal structure was supported by density functional theory calculations.
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