Anomalous Uniaxial Compression of Interlayer Distance in Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite

Abstract

We performed XRD observations of laser-shock compressed highly oriented pyrolytic graphite along the [002] orientation using an x-ray free electron laser: SACLA. The x-ray diffraction detector recorded x-rays that are diffracted from multiple lattice planes. These diffracted x-rays indicate both uncompressed and compressed states. We observed diffraction lines from the (002) plane in both states as spots that resembled single crystals. From our analysis, we successfully observed the uniaxial compression anomalous lattice state in which the interlayer distance of graphite was compressed by about 16%. The diffraction line, such as the compressed (103) plane, also shows that the (002) plane is almost ideal to the compressed uniaxial.