The structures of molten magnesium and manganese (II) chlorides

Abstract

The structures of molten MgCl₂ and of molten MnCl₂ have been investigated by applying the technique of neutron diffraction to isotopically enriched samples. For MgCl₂, the three partial structure factors and the three pair correlation functions have been extracted from the experimental data. For MnCl₂, the total structure factor and total pair correlation function were derived. Since manganese has a negative scattering length, a single experiment on natural MnCl₂ was sufficient to extract the Mn-Cl interionic separation and coordination number. It is shown that MnCl₂ and MgCl₂ are structurally similar in the liquid phase. It is shown that the structure of both melts is significantly different from that of molten ZnCl₂.