Physical Properties of Liquid Fe-S Alloys at High Pressure

Sulfur is classically considered the dominant light element alloyed to iron in the core of small telluric planets such as Mercury and Mars. The expected pressure (P) and temperature (T) conditions are: P between 6 and 40 GPa and T between 1300 and 2300 K for Mercury's core and P between 24 and 42 GPa and T between 1800 and 2600 K for Mars'core. The presence of an internally generated magnetic field and the amplitude of its 88d libration support the liquid nature of a portion of Merury's core, and various independent lines of evident suggest that Mars's core has been liquid throughout its history. However, as only few experiments, mostly based on sink/float methods studied liquid Fe-S alloys, little is known about the physical properties at these P-T conditions, greatly limiting our capability to produce accurate planetary models. Here we present results of in-situ x-ray diffraction experiments on Fe-S liquids compressed in laser heated diamond anvil cell and of ex-situ electron microcopy analysis of the recovered samples. Our data allowed us to determine the evolution of the eutectic composition with pressure and to establish the eutectic melting curve up to 50 GPa. The x-ray diffuse signal from the liquid is analyzed to derive the density and compressibility of the Fe-S liquid alloys as a function of the S content.