High pressure thermoelasticity and sound velocities of Fe-Ni-Si alloys

Abstract

The Earth's iron-dominant core is known to contain nickel from cosmochemical analysis and some amount of light elements from geophysical constraints on density and seismic wave velocities. Although there have been several studies to constrain thermoelastic properties of iron-alloys, there has been no systematic study on the effects of nickel and light elements on properties of iron using the same experimental methods and data analysis approach. We conducted nuclear resonant inelastic X-ray scattering and X-ray diffraction experiments on body-centered cubic and hexagonal close-packed (hcp) Fe_(0.91)Ni_(0.09) and Fe_(0.8)Ni_(0.1)Si_(0.1) up to 104 GPa and 86 GPa, respectively, and compare to similar measurements conducted on hcp-Fe up to 171 GPa. Specifically, we determine the Debye sound velocity from the low-energy transfer region of the (partial) phonon density of states (DOS) using the equation of state determined for each material and a new approach which utilizes information criteria and probability distributions. Nickel decreases the shear velocity of iron, while 10 at% Si has little to no effect on the shear velocity of Fe_(0.91)Ni_(0.09). We observe that the shape of the phonon DOS of these alloys remains similar with increasing pressure. In the measured compression range, we therefore apply a generalized scaling law to describe the volume dependence of the phonon DOS and find that the vibrational Grüneisen parameters of hcp-Fe_(0.91)Ni_(0.09) are nearly indistinguishable from those hcp-Fe and those for Fe_(0.8)Ni_(0.1)Si_(0.1) trend lower. From the vibrational free energy, we constrain the harmonic vibrational component of thermal pressure, which shows a significant positive deviation from theoretical calculations of hcp-Fe at pressures and temperatures of Earth's core. Collectively, our results demonstrate that the effects of nickel should be considered when modeling iron-rich planetary cores.