Thermophysical properties and phase diagrams in the system MgO–SiO2–FeO at upper mantle and transition zone conditions derived from a multiple-Einstein method

Abstract

We applied a lattice vibrational technique, based on representing the vibrational density of states with multiple-Einstein frequencies, to determine consistency of data on thermophysical properties and phase diagrams in the system MgO–FeO–SiO2. We present analyses of these data in the temperature range between 0 and 2000 K and pressure range between 0 and 20 GPa. The result is a database containing phases relevant to the Earth upper mantle and transition zone. We show that consistency of different datasets associated with the dissociation of the ringwoodite form of Fe2SiO4 depends on the crucible material that has been used to perform partitioning experiments between ringwoodite and ferropericlase, and that this results in different phase diagrams for FeSiO3 and the post-spinel part of Mg2SiO4–Fe2SiO4. We show that the existence of a phase field coesite + ringwoodite in the phase diagram of FeSiO3 is possible and that it might be used to fine-tune pressure scales. We demonstrate that the phase boundary between coesite and quartz is very sensitive to the low-temperature heat capacity of coesite and that heat capacity data of β-quartz are too large to be reconciled with the phase boundary between β-quartz and coesite. We compare our results with seismic data associated with the 410 km seismic discontinuity.