Static compression of iron to 78 GPa with rare gas solids as pressure‐transmitting media

Abstract

New data are presented for the room temperature, static compression of iron to 78 GPa with solid neon and argon as pressure‐transmitting media. X ray diffraction studies have been performed on a geophysically relevant material, for the first time to such pressures under quasihydrostatic conditions, in a diamond anvil cell. The hydrostatic technique leads to increased precision in the measurement of high pressures and has placed closer constraints on the equation of state of ε iron. From a linear least squares fit of a finite strain equation of state to the present data combined with earlier, low‐pressure data for metastable ε iron, the preferred values for the zero‐pressure isothermal bulk modulus, K0, and first pressure derivative, K0′, are 192.7 (±9.0) GPa and 4.29 (±0.36), respectively. The zero‐pressure volume for the ε phase is 6.687 (±0.018) cm3/mol. On the basis of the pressure‐volume curve calculated from fits of the finite strain equation of state, ε iron appears to be less compressible under nonhydrostatic conditions, but the differences are within the error of the nonhydrostatic experiment. The results also confirm that the absence of a soft medium in static compression experiments with the diamond anvil cell results in an overestimate of the unit cell volume (measured with the incident X ray beam parallel to the load axis) for pressures calculated with the nonhydrostatic ruby calibration scale. It is found that for ε iron, substantial compensation for this nonhydrostatic effect is implicit in the nonhydrostatic ruby pressure scale up to intermediate strains. The hydrostatic data and the ε iron isotherm derived from shock wave experiments on iron samples are in very close agreement.