Although the crystal structure of the high-pressure SiO2 polymorph stishovite has been studied in detail, little is known about the development of crystallographic preferred orientation (CPO) during deformation in stishovite. Insight into CPO and associated deformation mechanics of stishovite would provide important information for understanding subduction of quartz-bearing crustal rocks into the mantle. To study CPO development, we converted a natural sample of flint to stishovite in a laser-heated diamond anvil cell and compressed the stishovite aggregate up to 38 GPa. We collected diffraction patterns in radial geometry to examine in situ development of crystallographic preferred orientation and find that (001) poles preferentially align with the compression direction. Viscoplastic self-consistent modeling suggests the most likely slip systems at high pressure and ambient temperature are pyramidal and basal slip.

We report a study of high pressure x-ray absorption (XAS) performed in the partial fluorescence yield mode (PFY) at the U L3 edge (0–28.2 GPa) and single crystal x-ray diffraction (SXD) (0–20 GPa) on the UCd11 heavy fermion compound at room temperature. Under compression, the PFY-XAS results show that the white line is shifted by +4.1(3) eV at the highest applied pressure of 28.2 GPa indicating delocalization of the 5f electrons. The increase in full width at half maxima and decrease in relative amplitude of the white line with respect to the edge jump point towards 6d band broadening under high pressure. A bulk modulus of K0 = 62(1) GPa and its pressure derivative, K0 = 4.9(2) was determined from high pressure SXD results. Both the PFY-XAS and diffraction results do not show any sign of a structural phase transition in the applied pressure range.