Figure 2: Pre- and post-shocked synthetic whitlockite.
From: Shock-transformation of whitlockite to merrillite and the implications for meteoritic phosphate
Black crosses, collected diffraction data. Blue line, modelled pattern of whitlockite. Red line, modelled pattern of merrillite. We chose Q over conventional 2θ, because the two patterns were collected at different X-ray wavelengths (see Methods). (a) Diffraction pattern for pre-shocked synthetic Mg-whitlockite (UNLV Batch B4). Sample is whitlockite with approximately 2% merrillite, consistent with previous work14,16. Sample grain size was approximately 300 nm. (b) Diffraction pattern for the same synthetic Mg-whitlockite material recovered from shock experiment GG093. The shocked sample contains ∼35 mass % merrillite. Overall diffraction peaks of the shock-recovered sample are broader than in the starting material because average grain size was reduced to 45–60 nm (based on diffraction peak width analysis).
