Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Abstract: The thermal equation of state (TEOS) for solids is a mathematic model among pressure, temperature and density, and is essential for geophysical, geochemical, and other high pressure–temperature (high P–T) researches. However, in the last few decades, there has been a growing concern about the accuracy of the pressure scales of the calibrants, and efforts have been made to improve it by either introducing a reference standard or building new thermal pressure models. The existing thermal equation of state,P(V,T) = P(V,T0) + Pth(V,T), consists of an isothermal compression and an isochoric heating, while the thermal pressure is the pressure change in the isochoric heating. In this paper, we demonstrate that, for solids in a soft pressure medium in a diamond anvil cell, the thermal pressure can neither be determined from a single heating process, nor from the thermal pressure of its calibrant. To avoid the thermal pressure, we propose to replace the thermal pressure with a well-known thermal expansion model, and integrate it with the isothermal compression model to yields a Birch–Murnaghan-expansion TEOS model, called VPT TEOS. The predicted pressure of MgO and Au at ambient pressure from Birch–Murnaghan-expansion VPT TEOS model matches the experimental pressure of zero (0) GPa very well, while the pressure prediction from the approximated Anderson PVT TEOS exhibit a big deviation and a wrong trend.