Using an anvil made of diamond, physicists have successfully squeezed iron into the form we think it has deep in the center of Earth.
There's just one problem in this quest to understand Earth's core. Here on the surface, in a nice, relatively low atmospheric pressure regime, conditions in the core are difficult to replicate. But we can create high-pressure conditions for brief pulses of time, using diamond anvils and heat.
"We report here the synthesis of ϵ-Fe single crystals in diamond anvil cells and subsequent measurement of single-crystal elastic constants of this phase up to 32 GPa at 300 Kelvin with inelastic X-ray scattering,"frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen>, or alpha iron.
So, Dewaele and her colleagues approached the problem stepwise. They placed crystals of ferrite in a diamond anvil in a vacuum heater, and increased the pressure to 7 gigapascals and the temperature to 800 Kelvin . This produced an intermediate phase of iron that occurs at high temperatures in atmospheric conditions called, or gamma iron. Austenite has a different structure to ferrite, and the austenite crystals the team made changed into the hexaferrum phase far more smoothly at pressures between 15 and 33 gigapascals at 300 Kelvin.
Then, they used a synchrotron beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility to probe the hexaferrum and analyze its properties.What we know of Earth's core is largely reconstructed based on seismic data. Acoustic waves created by planetary tremors propagate differently through different materials; this is
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