中国科学院地球化学研究所机构知识库

The understanding of the physical and chemical properties of magnesite (MgCO3) under deep-mantle conditions is highly important to capture the essence of deep-carbon storage in Earth's interior. To develop standard rating scales, the impurity-free magnesite single crystal, paying particular attention to the case of avoiding adverse impacts of Ca2+, Fe2+, and Mn2+ impurities in natural magnesite, is undoubtedly necessary for all research of magnesite, including crystalline structural phase transitions, anisotropic elasticity and conductivity, and equation of state (EoS). Thus, a high-quality single crystal of impurity-free magnesite was grown successfully for the first time using the self-flux method under high pressure-temperature conditions. The size of the magnesite single crystal, observed in a plane-polarized microscope, exceeds 200 mu m, and the crystal exhibits a rhombohedral structure to cleave along the (101) plane. In addition, its composition of Mg0.999 +/- 0.001CO3 was quantified through electron probing analysis. The structural property was investigated by means of single crystal X-ray diffraction and the unit cell dimensions obtained in the rhombohedral symmetry of the space group are a = 4.6255 (3) and c = 14.987 (2), and the final R = 0.0243 for 718 reflections. High-pressure Raman spectroscopy of the magnesite single crystal was performed up to 27 GPa at ambient temperature. All Raman active bands, nu (i), without any splitting increased almost linearly with increasing pressure. In combination with the high-pressure Raman results and the bulk modulus K (T) (103 GPa) reported from magnesite EoS studies, the mode Gruneisen parameters (1.49, 1.40, 0.26, and 0.27) of each vibration (T, L, nu (4), and nu (1)) were calculated.