A Neutron Diffraction Study of a Hydrogen Containing Organic Liquid CHCl3 as an Example

The differential cross section of liquid CHCl3, exhibiting pronounced coherent scattering, was measured using polarized neutrons; the double differential cross section was also determined at selected scattering angles. From the spin and non spin flip part the spin incoherent scattering including the inelastic effects could be extracted. After correcting all cross sections for background and absorption multiple scattering was computed taking into account the spin flip at each elementary scattering process. The correction for inelastic effects followed from three methods: from the spin analysis of the spin incoherent part, from the combination of experiments with and without spin analysis and from the zero positions of the intramolecular scattering. The fully corrected coherent cross section was separated into an intra‐ and intermolecular contribution. From the former the structure of the molecule in the liquid was derived, whereas the Fourier transformation of the latter yielded the weighted sum of atom pair correlation functions.