Molten inorganic salts are attracting resurgent attention because of their unique physicochemical properties, making them promising media for next-generation concentrating solar power systems and molten salt reactors. The dynamics of these highly disordered ionic media is largely studied by theoretical simulations, while the robust experimental techniques capable of observing local dynamics are not well-developed. To provide fundamental insights into the atomic-scale transport properties of molten salts, we report the real-space dynamics of molten magnesium chloride at high temperatures employing the Van Hove correlation function obtained by inelastic neutron scattering. Our results directly depict the distance-dependent dynamics of a molten salt on the picosecond time scale. This study demonstrates the capability of the developed approach to describe the locally correlated- and self-dynamics in molten salts, significantly improving our understanding of the interplay between microscopic structural parameters and their dynamics that ultimately control physical properties of condensed matter in extreme environments.

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使用 Van Hove 相关函数的熔融无机盐的实空间局部动力学

熔融无机盐因其独特的物理化学性质而重新引起人们的关注，使其成为下一代聚光太阳能发电系统和熔盐反应堆的有希望的介质。这些高度无序的离子介质的动力学主要通过理论模拟来研究，而能够观察局部动力学的稳健实验技术尚未得到很好的发展。为了提供对熔盐原子尺度传输特性的基本见解，我们使用通过非弹性中子散射获得的范霍夫相关函数报告了高温下熔融氯化镁的真实空间动力学。我们的结果直接描述了熔盐在皮秒时间尺度上的距离相关动力学。