open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/83321

Radiolysis-Induced Crystallization of Sodium Chloride in Acetone by Electron Beam Irradiation

英語

solubility

2021-05-21

Cambridge University Press

Microscopy and microanalysis

27(3)

459-465

In situ liquid cell transmission electron microscopy (LC-TEM) is an innovative method for studying the processes involved in the formation of crystals in liquids. However, it is difficult to capture early stages of crystallization because of the small field of view and the unfavorable changes in sample composition resulting from electron-beam radiolysis. Nevertheless, if the radiolysis required to induce the crystallization of a sample could be controlled in LC-TEM, this would be advantageous for observing the crystallization process. Here, we examined this possibility by using a mixture of sodium chlorate (NaClO3) and acetone in the LC-TEM. The electron beam induced the formation of dendritic crystals in a saturated acetone solution of NaClO3; moreover, these crystals consisted of sodium chloride (NaCl), rather than NaClO3, suggesting that chloride ions (Cl-), which were not present in the initial solution, were generated by radiolysis of chlorate ions . As a result, the solution then supersaturated with NaCl because its solubility in acetone is much lower than that of NaClO3. The combination of radiolysis and a solvent in which a solute is much less soluble is potentially useful for establishing crystallization conditions for materials that are difficult to crystallize directly in LC-TEM experiments.

学術雑誌論文

Accepted Manuscript

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

This article has been published in a revised form in Microscopy and Microanalysis https://doi.org/10.1017/S1431927621000179. This version is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND. No commercial re-distribution or re-use allowed. Derivative works cannot be distributed. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Microscopy Society of America .

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