A High-Temperature Electrical Conduction Mechanism in the Lower Mantle Phase (Mg,Fe)1-xO

Influence of High Conductive Magnetite Impurity on the Electrical Conductivity of Dry Olivine Aggregates at High Temperature and High Pressure

The electrical conductivity of dry sintered olivine aggregates with various contents of magnetite (0, 3, 5, 7, 10, 20, and 100 vol. %) was measured at temperatures of 873–1273 K and a pressure of 2.0 GPa within a frequency range of 0.1–106 Hz. The changes of the electrical conductivity of the samples with temperature followed an Arrhenius relation. The electrical conductivity of the sintered olivine aggregates increased as the magnetite-bearing content increased, and the activation enthalpy decreased, accordingly. When the content of interconnected magnetite was higher than the percolation threshold (~5 vol. %), the electrical conductivity of the samples was markedly enhanced. As the pressure increased from 1.0 to 3.0 GPa, the electrical conductivity of the magnetite-free olivine aggregates decreased, whereas the electrical conductivity of the 5 vol. % magnetite-bearing sample increased. Furthermore, the activation energy and activation volume of the 5 vol. % magnetite-bearing sintered olivine aggregates at atmospheric pressure were calculated to be 0.16 ± 0.04 eV and −1.50 ± 0.04 cm3/mole respectively. Due to the high value of percolation threshold (~5 vol. %) in the magnetite impurity sample, our present results suggest that regional high conductivity anomalies in the deep Earth’s interior cannot be explained by the presence of the interconnected magnetite-bearing olivine aggregates.

Effects of vacancy defects on Fe properties incorporated in MgO

Distributions of Fe in MgO containing Mg vacancy, O vacancy, and Schottky defect are investigated based on the density functional theory (DFT). Our results show that since Mg vacancy will remove electrons from MgO, Fe tends to get close to Mg vacancy but far from O vacancy. The Mg vacancy can decrease the magnetic moment of iron and change its valence state from 2+  to 3+, which leads to ~5% decrease of Fe-O bond length comparable to the effect of 30 GPa external pressure. Furthermore, iron incorporation can increase the Schottky defect concentration of MgO especially in the environment of the Earth's lower mantle, where ~20 mol% Fe-bearing MgO locates at extreme high temperature conditions.

Charge transfer in FeO: A combined molecular-dynamics and ab initio study

Molecular-dynamics simulations and ab initio electronic structure calculations were carried out to determine the rate of charge transfer in stoichiometric wustite (FeO). The charge transfer of interest occurs by II/III valence interchange between nearest-neighbor Fe atoms, with the Fe(III) constituting a "hole" electronic defect. There are two possible nearest-neighbor charge transfers in the FeO lattice, which occur between edge-sharing or corner-sharing FeO(6) octahedra. Molecular-dynamics simulations predict charge-transfer rates of 3.7 x 10(11) and 1.9 x 10(9) s(-1) for the edge and corner transfers, respectively, in good agreement with those calculated using an ab initio cluster approach (1.6 x 10(11) and 8.0 x 10(8) s(-1), respectively). The calculated rates are also similar to those along the basal and c-axis directions in hematite (alpha-Fe(2)O(3)) determined previously. Therefore, as is the case for hematite, wustite is predicted to show anisotropic electrical conductivity. Our findings indicate that a rigid-ion model does not give acceptable results, thus showing the need to account for the change in polarizability of the system upon charge transfer. Our model achieves this by using a simple mechanical shell model. By calculating the electronic coupling matrix elements for many transition state configurations obtained from the molecular-dynamics simulations, we found evidence that the position of the bridging oxygen atoms can greatly affect the amount of electronic coupling between the donor and acceptor states. Finally, we address the effect of oxygen vacancies on the charge transfer. It was found that an oxygen vacancy not only creates a driving force for holes to transport away from the vacancy (or equivalently for electrons to diffuse toward the vacancy) but also lowers the free-energy barriers for charge transfer. In addition, the reorganization energy significantly differed from the nondefective case in a small radius around the defect.