Simulation of complete neutron scattering experiments: from model systems to liquid germanium

In this thesis, both theoretical and experimental studies of liquids are done. Neutron scattering enables structural and dynamical properties of liquids to be investigated. On the theoretical side, molecular dynamics simulations are of great interest since they give positions and velocities of the atoms and the forces acting on each of them. They also enable spatial and temporal correlations to be computed and these quantities are also available from neutron scattering experiments. Consequently, the comparison can be made between results from molecular dynamics simulations and from neutron scattering experiments, in order to improve our understanding of the structure and dynamics of liquids. However, since extracting reliable data from a neutron scattering experiment is difficult, we propose to simulate the experiment as a whole, including both instrument and sample, in order to gain understanding and to evaluate the impact of the different parasitic contributions (absorption, multiple scattering associated with elastic and inelastic scattering, instrument resolution). This approach, in which the sample is described by its structure and dynamics as computed from molecular dynamics simulations, is presented and tested on isotropic model systems. Then liquid germanium is investigated by inelastic neutron scattering and both classical and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. This enables us to simulate the experiment we performed and to evaluate the influence of the contributions from the instrument and from the sample on the detected signal. (author)