SXD study of water in beryl at low temperatures

Porous materials play an important role in numerous natural systems and technical applications, including chromatography, heterogeneous catalysis and fluid storage. There exist a significant class of crystalline materials, including beryl, cordierite, hemimorphite, dioptase, crystobalite, zeolites and others, that contain structural pores, which are large enough to contain significant quantities of water, CO2, and other gaseous species. Beryl, for instance, is known to contain up to 2 wt.% water in such confinement. Because confinement in such structures is largely 1- dimensional and the diameter of the confining channel (<1 nm) is not much bigger than that of the confined molecule, we have referred to such systems as ultraconfined. Many of these materials are available as large single crystals, allowing us to study anisotropy of the vibrational and diffusive dynamics.