Equation of state of MgO up to 345 GPa and 8500 K

Abstract

The accurate equation of state (EOS) of MgO can be used as a pressure scale, but the EOS currently used has too much uncertainty to serve as a pressure scale, especially at high-pressure and high-temperature conditions. Here we present a complete EOS of solid MgO up to 345 GPa, 8500 K, and its derived pressure-volume-temperature (P-V-T) EOS form, which can be used as a pressure scale. In this EOS, the free energy is expressed as a three-parameter function based on a quasi-Debye thermodynamic model, which establishes a relatively accurate phonon thermodynamic description by determining the phonon dispersion relation and phonon density of states from the volume-dependent sound velocity. The three parameters are determined by a global optimization method, which minimizes the sum of the weighted variances between the physical quantities calculated by the thermodynamic model and the relevant experimental values within the unified EOS framework. To improve the accuracy of the EOS, the parameters are constrained by room-temperature sound velocities and shock compression data, including P-V-T data and sound velocities up to 265 GPa along the principal Hugoniot of MgO measured by us, the P-V-T data at 174--203 GPa, and partial P-V-T data of MgO preheated to 1850 K by others. The derived EOS of MgO can well reproduce not only the above data used to define the parameters, but also the shock compression data and the measured isobaric specific heat not used in the parameter optimization.