Structure of liquid ammonia at high pressures and temperatures

International audienceThe structure of liquid ammonia (NH3) is investigated from 1 to 6.3 GPa and up to 800 K by means of synchrotron x-ray diffraction (XRD) and ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations. The XRD data are used to extract the molecular structure factor S mol (Q), pair distribution function (PDF) g mol (r), and the density of NH3. There is an excellent agreement between present S mol (Q) and g mol (r) at our lowest density and those reported in reference neutron experiments. Our densities agree better with the equation of state of Tillner-Roth et al. [1] than with more recent equation of state (EoS) models. The experimental structure factor and PDF are well reproduced by AIMD simulations using either the BLYP or the PBE exchange-correlation functional. The shapes of S mol (Q) and g mol (r) vary little over the investigated pressure range and suggest a compact liquid with weak orientational correlations between molecules, which is corroborated by the coordination number varying from 12.7 to ∼14. The simulations are used to study the evolution of the site-site pair distribution functions, which reveals that the number of H-bonds per molecule (between 1.5 and 2) do not evolve with density, and that the distribution of H atoms around N atoms becomes more and more anisotropic with pressure