Sites and diffusion for muons and hydrogen in titanium hydrides

Abstract

Low temperature sites for muons implanted in TiHx have been found to be a mixture of interstitial and substitutional sites, with substitutional occupancy determined by the probability that a muon in an interstitial site will have a vacant nearest neighbor substitutional site. As with ZrHx, activation from the interstitial site is observed below 300 K. From the depolarization rate in the substitutional site, the muon likely displaces the neighboring H atoms by about 0.1 A. Diffusion for the substitutional muons occurs above room temperature with an activation of about 0.38 eV, which is less than the 0.505 eV for hydrogen vacancy motion observed by NMR. To explain this the muon transition rate to a vacancy must be less than that of hydrogen.