November 16, 2023

Ice in the Rough: Isolating Neutron Scattering Intensities of Ice

hrough high-pressure crystallography, scientists can study the behavior of matter at extreme pressures.  When water ice is subjected to such extreme pressures, it is believed to turn into a highly ordered structure of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, exhibiting patterns of scientific interest. However, the only material strong enough to hold the ice at extreme pressures is single crystal diamond, which adds its own signal in neutron scattering experiments used to study the structure. In this talk, we present methods to filter out scattering intensity signals stemming from diamonds and from the background, to retrieve voxels corresponding to ice. First, our method filters out large signals through clustering. Then, very small signal values indicative of background is filtered out through using Kernel Density Estimation. We find it possible to automatically filter the data to arrive at two- and three-dimensional representations that show a high level of detail in the signals.