Diffusion of hydrogen fluoride in solid parahydrogen.

We studied diffusion of hydrogen fluoride (HF) in solid parahydrogen (pH2) around 4 K. Diffusion rates were determined from time dependence of FT-IR spectra of HF monomers. The absorption of HF monomers shows temporal decay due to dimerization reaction via diffusion. It was found that the rates are affected by the sample temperature, the initial HF concentration, and annealing of samples. The observed non-Arrhenius-type temperature dependence suggests that the diffusion is dominated by a quantum tunneling process, that is, "quantum diffusion." Deceleration of the diffusion in condensed samples and acceleration in annealed samples were also observed. These results can be attributed to the fact that lower periodicity of samples due to impurities or defects suppresses the quantum tunneling. It seems to be difficult to explain the observed dependences by three possible diffusion mechanisms, exchange of chemical bonds, direct cyclic exchange, and exchange with mobile vacancy. Therefore, we propose a hypothetical mechanism by exchange of vacancies originating from quantum effect.

Coherence decay measurement of v = 2 vibrons in solid parahydrogen.

The coherence decay of the v = 2 vibrational state (vibrons) of solid parahydrogen was measured via time-resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy. We found that the decay curve has a non-exponential time profile in the time scale of 200 ns at a low temperature below 5 K and a low orthohydrogen impurity concentration (~0.01%). This behavior, as also observed in the case of the v = 1 vibrons, represents a signature of band structure of the v = 2 state in the solid phase. The maximum coherence decay time of 50 ns in an exponential part was achieved, which shows excellence of the v = 2 state for coherent processes. We also found that finite temperatures, orthohydrogen impurities, and other structural inhomogeneity accelerate the decay, hiding the non-exponential feature of the vibron band.

Spectroscopy of HF and HF-containing clusters in solid parahydrogen.

We report measurements of FT-IR absorption spectroscopy of HF, DF, and their clusters in solid parahydrogen (pH(2)). The observed spectra contain many absorption lines which were assigned to HF monomers, HF polymers, and clusters with other species, such as N(2), O(2), orthohydrogen (oH(2)), etc. The rotational constants of HF and DF monomers were determined from the cooperative transitions of the vibration of solid pH(2) and the rotation of HF and DF. Small reduction of the rotational constants indicates that HF and DF are nearly free rotors in solid pH(2). Time dependence of the spectra suggests that HF and DF monomers migrate in solid pH(2) and form larger polymers, probably via tunneling reactions through high energy barriers on inserting another monomer to the polymers. The line width of HF monomers in solid pH(2) was found to be 4 cm(-1), which is larger than that of other hydrogen halides in solid pH(2). This broad line width is explained by rapid rotational relaxation due to the accidental coincidence between the rotational energy of HF and the phonon energy with maximum density of states of solid pH(2) and the rotational-translational coupling in a trapping site.