Abstract
Since Ross proposed that there might be ‘diamonds in the sky’ in 1981 (ref. 1), the idea of significant quantities of pure carbon existing in giant planets such as Uranus and Neptune has gained both experimental2 and theoretical3 support. It is now accepted that the high-pressure, high-temperature behaviour of carbon is essential to predicting the evolution and structure of such planets4. Still, one of the most defining of thermal properties for diamond, the melting temperature, has never been directly measured. This is perhaps understandable, given that diamond is thermodynamically unstable, converting to graphite before melting at ambient pressure, and tightly bonded, being the strongest bulk material known5,6. Shock-compression experiments on diamond reported here reveal the melting temperature of carbon at pressures of 0.6–1.1 TPa (6–11 Mbar), and show that crystalline diamond can be stable deep inside giant planets such as Uranus and Neptune1,2,3,4,7. The data indicate that diamond melts to a denser, metallic fluid—with the melting curve showing a negative Clapeyron slope—between 0.60 and 1.05 TPa, in good agreement with predictions of first-principles calculations8. Temperature data at still higher pressures suggest diamond melts to a complex fluid state, which dissociates at shock pressures between 1.1 and 2.5 TPa (11–25 Mbar) as the temperatures increase above 50,000 K.
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Acknowledgements
We thank W. Unites for sample support. This work was carried out under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
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J.H.E., D.G.H., P.M.C., D.K.B. and T.R.B. designed and carried out the experiments. J.H.E., D.G.H., P.M.C. and R.S.M. carried out the analysis; J.E.M. and T.R.B. calibrated the SOP. R.J. and G.W.C. administered the experiment and J.H.E., R.J. and G.W.C. wrote the manuscript.
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Eggert, J., Hicks, D., Celliers, P. et al. Melting temperature of diamond at ultrahigh pressure. Nature Phys 6, 40–43 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1438
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1438
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