No Arabic abstract
Studies of the behaviour of solids at ultra-high pressures, those beyond 200 GPa, contribute to our fundamental understanding of materials properties and allow an insight into the processes happening at such extreme conditions relevant for terrestrial and extra-terrestrial bodies. The behaviour of magnesium oxide, MgO, is of a particular importance, as it is believed to be a major phase in the Earth lower mantle and the interior of super-Earth planets. Here we report the results of studies of MgO at ultra-high static pressures up to ca. 660 GPa using the double-stage diamond anvil cell technique with synchrotron X-ray diffraction. We observed the B1-B2 phase transition in the pressure interval from 429(10) GPa to 562(10) GPa setting an unambiguous reference mark for the B1-B2 transition in MgO at room temperature. Our observations allow constraining theoretical predictions and results of available so far dynamic compression experiments.
Lanthanum (La), the first member of the rare-earth elements, recently aroused strong interest due to its unique superhydride with superconducting properties. Although there is much theoretical and experimental work about phase transitions and superconductivity in metallic La, we got a new body-centred tetragonal ($bct$) phase in metallic La with space group $I4/mmm$ at $190$ GPa exchanging from face-centered cubic ($fcc$) phase in previous work, which expanded the phase transition sequence. The $bct$ phase shows an abnormal packing way that turned to non-closed packing at high pressure. And more detailed properties of the new phase are discussed.
The existence of second-order structural phase transition in the SnS at a pressure of 16 GPa has been proved theoretically. The calculation is performed using the plane-wave pseudopotential approach to density-functional theory within the local-density approximation (LDA) with the help of the ABINIT software package. The abrupt change in volume compression with unit cell volume continuous change of the crystal is the clear evidence of the second-order phase transition. It is shown that the phase transition is caused by the softening of the low-frequency fully symmetric interlayer mode with increasing pressure. As a result, displacement type phase transition (PT) take place with the change of translational symmetry of the crystal from the simple orthorhombic to the base-centered orthorhombic (Pcmn to Cmcm).
When monoclinic monazite-type LaVO4 (space group P21/n) is squeezed up to 12 GPa at room temperature, a phase transition to another monoclinic phase has been found. The structure of the high-pressure phase of LaVO4 is indexed with the same space group (P21/n), but with a larger unit-cell in which the number of atoms is doubled. The transition leads to an 8% increase in the density of LaVO4. The occurrence of such a transition has been determined by x-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and ab initio calculations. The combination of the three techniques allows us to also characterize accurately the pressure evolution of unit-cell parameters and the Raman (and IR)-active phonons of the low- and high-pressure phase. In particular, room-temperature equations of state have been determined. The changes driven by pressure in the crystal structure induce sharp modifications in the color of LaVO4 crystals, suggesting that behind the monoclinic-to-monoclinic transition there are important changes of the electronic properties of LaVO4.
The crystal structure of CeN was investigated up to pressures of 82 GPa, using diamond anvil cell powder X-ray diffraction in two experiments with He and Si-oil as the pressure transmitting media. In contrast to previous reports, we do not observe the B2 (CsCl type) structure at high pressure. Instead, the structural phase transition, starting at 65 GPa, from the ambient rock salt B1 structure results in a distorted CsCl-like B10 structure, irrespective of the pressure medium. Our result unambiguously confirms two recent density functional theory (DFT) studies predicting the B10 phase to be stable at these pressures, rather than the B2 (CsCl type) phase previously reported. The B10 structure appears to approach the B2 structure as pressure is increased further, but DFT calculations indicate that an L1 0 structure (AuCu type) is energetically favored.
In this letter, we describe the stabilization of indium antimonide (InSb) in the high-pressure orthorhombic phase (InSb-III) at ambient conditions. Until now, InSb-III has only been observed above 9 GPa, or at around 3 GPa as a metastable structure during the phase transition from cubic zinc blende (InSb-I) to orthorhombic InSb-IV. The crystalline phase transition from InSb-I to InSb-III was driven by an ultrashort, laser-generated, non-hydrostatic pressure pulse. The transition occurred in preferred orientations locked to the initial orientation of the InSb-I crystal, breaking the symmetry of the InSb-I cubic cell to form the InSb-III orthorhombic cell.