Saturation of electrical resistivity of solid iron at Earth’s core conditions

Abstract

We report on the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity of solid iron at high pressure, up to and including conditions likely to be found at the centre of the Earth. We have extended some of the calculations of the resistivities of pure solid iron we recently performed at Earth’s core conditions (Pozzo et al. in Earth Planet Sci Lett 393:159–164, 2014) to lower temperature. We show that at low temperature the resistivity increases linearly with temperature, and saturates at high temperature. This saturation effect is well known as the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit in metals, but has been largely ignored to estimate the resistivity of iron at Earth’s core conditions. Recent experiments (Gomi et al. in Phys Earth Planet Int 224:88–103, 2013) coupled new high pressure data and saturation to predict the resitivity of iron and iron alloys at Earth’s core conditions, and reported values up to three times lower than previous estimates, confirming recent first principles calculations (de Koker et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 109:4070–4073, 2012; Pozzo et al. in Nature 485:355–358, 2012, Phys Rev B 87:014110-10, 2013, Earth Planet Sci Lett 393:159–164, 2014; Davies et al. in Nat Geosci 8:678–685, 2015). The present results support the saturation effect idea.