Laser heating technique

The laser heating technique can be applied to perform temperature jumps by irradiating short laser pulses at the sample container. Ernst et al. (54) used such a temperature jump protocol to perform stop-and-go experiments. After the start of the laser pulse, the temperature inside the sample volume is raised to the reaction temperature, the conversion of the adsorbed reactants proceeds, and the H MAS NMR measurement is performed. After the laser pulse is stopped, the temperature inside the sample volume decreases to ambient temperature, and the C MAS NMR measurement is made. Subsequently, the next laser pulse is started and, in this way, the reaction is recorded as a function of the reaction time. By use of the free-induction decay and the reaction time as time domains and respectively, a two-dimensional Fourier transformation leads to a two-dimensional spectrum, which contains the NMR spectrum in the Ej-dimension and the reaction rate information in the Ts-dimension (54,55). 

The cubic y-modification has been recently observed under a pressure of 15 GPa and temperatures above 2000 K by the laser heating technique in a diamond cell [23] and in shock-wave compression experiments with pressures >33 GPa at 1800 K and >50 GPa at 2400 K [29]. This modification is often designated as the c-modification in the literature in analogy to the cubic boron nitride (c-BN). It has a spinel-type structure in which two silicon atoms are octahedrally coordinated by six nitrogen atoms, one silicon atom is coordinated tetrahedrally by four nitrogen atoms (Fig. 3c). The atomic coordinates for the cubic modification are given in Table 2. From calculations it is shown that this structure should have a high hardness similar to that of diamond and c-BN [23]. 

Phase Transitions and Material Synthesis using the C02-Laser Heating Technique in a Diamond Cell... 

Figure 1. Pressttie-temperature regime accessed to date using the C02-laser heating technique is shown by the Kght gray field. The P-T values available for multianvil high pressure devices are given by the white field. The temperature on the surface of the sun is shown for comparison.

---