Abstract
By large scale molecular dynamics simulations of solid-liquid coexistence, we have investigated the melting of iron under pressures from 0 to 364 GPa. The temperatures of liquid and solid regions, and the pressure of the system are calculated to estimate the melting point of iron. We obtain the melting temperature of iron is about 6700±200K under the inner-outer core boundary, which is in good agreement with the result of Alfè et al. By the pair analysis technique, the microstructure of liquid iron under higher pressures is obviously different from that of lower pressures and ambient condition, indicating that the pressure-induced liquid-liquid phase transition may take place in iron melts.
Highlights
The Earth has a large core which stores a substantial part of the planet’s energy
Since iron is the dominant component of the core, experiment and theory have focused on the melting point of iron under high pressures
Brown and McQueen conducted pioneering measurement by shock compressed to pressures, the extrapolation of the Hugoniot melting point yielded an estimate of 5800±500K for the melting of pure iron at the ICB pressure.[2]
Summary
The Earth has a large core which stores a substantial part of the planet’s energy. The Earth’s core consists of a solid ball with a radius of 1221 km, surrounded by a liquid shell which extends up to 3480 km from the center of the planet, roughly half way towards the surface.[1]. Brown and McQueen conducted pioneering measurement by shock compressed to pressures, the extrapolation of the Hugoniot melting point yielded an estimate of 5800±500K for the melting of pure iron at the ICB pressure.[2] The past few years have witnessed the strenuous efforts on exploring the melting points of iron at the Earth’s core conditions Despite these contributions, there is a fairly large range of results obtained by different groups.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] The unsatisfactory agreement suggests that the melting points of iron at the conditions of the Earth’s core still remain to be further explored from experiment and theory
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