High pressure neutron diffraction studies using the Paris-Edinburgh cell

Neutron diffraction was until recently confined to pressures below ∼ 3 GPa. This restricted range has limited the high-pressure structural information that is available for a wide range of phenomena for which neutron diffraction is the technique of choice. But now the recently-developed Paris-Edinburgh cell can achieve pressures up to ∼ 30 GPa with a sample volume large enough to allow accurate structural studies with neutrons. After a period of development of the neutron scattering techniques needed to obtain the best possible results using the cell, a variety of successful structural studies have been performed. These illustrate the value of neutron diffraction in important areas such as locating hydrogen and other low-Z atoms in structures, the measurement of accurate structural pressure dependence and the examination of the changes in atomic thermal motion with pressure.