Structural studies of liquid alcohols by neutron diffraction

Neutron diffraction experiments have been made on deuterated ethyl alcohol at 20°C using incident wavelengths of 0·7 and 0·5 Å. The cross-section data have been fitted to a molecular form-factor in order to determine the geometrical parameters defining the structure of the molecule. The parameter values were found to be insensitive to the choice of a gauche or trans conformation and gave values in satisfactory agreement with those obtained from studies of the gas and solid crystalline phases. There was an indication that the hydroxyl bond length for the liquid phase was stretched as observed in data for methyl alcohol [1] but the additional complexity imposed by the large number of terms in the interference pattern did not permit this to be unambiguously demonstrated. The intermolecular distribution function exhibits a broad oscillatory structure extending to 10 Å.