Thermoelastic properties of γ-Fe and γ- Fe64Ni36 alloys

The Earth’s core consists mainly of Fe-Ni alloy. Therefore the physical property of Fe-Ni alloy is a key issue to understand the planetary core. At 1 bar, γ-Fe is known as Anti-Invar alloy which shows anomalously high thermal expansivity, while γ-Fe64Ni36 is as a typical Inver-alloy. In addition, previous studies on γ-Fe-Ni Invar-alloys reported an anomalous pressure dependence of compression behavior (e.g., Dubrovinsky et al., 2001, Nataf et al., 2006, Matsushita et al., 2008). However, these studies were conducted at limited pressure range (> 6 GPa) or low temperature (30-300 K) conditions to identify physical properties of those alloys in the planetary interior. Therefore, we performed pressure-volume-temperature (P-V-T) measurements on γ-Fe and γ-Fe-Ni alloys at a wide P-T range of 0-23 GPa and 773-1873 K using the SPEED- Mk.II kawai-type multi-anvil apparatus at the SPring-8 synchrotron facility. On the basis of 2-γ state model by Weiss (1963), the thermal expansivity of γ-Fe can be decreased significantly with pressure. Our data, however, show no anomalous variation in the thermal expansion coefficient relative to pressure up to 23 GPa. In addition, anomalous pressure dependence on volume of γ-Fe64Ni36 reported by Matsushita et al. (2008) was not observed. Fitting 3rd order Birch-Murnaghan EOS and Mie-Grüneisen-Debye EOS to the P-V-T data of γ-Fe yielded V 0 = 49.028 ± 0.027 Å 3 , K T 0 = 111.2 ± 1.8 GPa, K ’ T = 5.2 ± 0.2, γ 0 = 2.30 ± 0.04 and q = -0.09 ± 0.21 with the fixed value of θ 0 = 340 K. The P-V data of γ- Fe64Ni36 was fittied using the 3rd order Birch-Marnagan, which yields V 0 = 48.85 ± 0.06 Å 3 , K T 0 = 88.1 ± 3.4 GPa, and K ’ 0 = 8.6± 0.5 at 1273 K.