Melting properties by X-ray absorption spectroscopy: common signatures in binary Fe–C, Fe–O, Fe–S and Fe–Si systems

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a widely used technique to probe the local environment around specific atomic species. Applied to samples under extreme pressure and temperature conditions, XAS is sensitive to phase transitions, including melting, and allows gathering insights on compositional variations and electronic changes occurring during such transitions. These characteristics can be exploited for studies of prime interest in geophysics and fundamental high-pressure physics. Here, we investigated the melting curve and the eutectic composition of four geophysically relevant iron binary systems: Fe–C, Fe–O, Fe–S and Fe–Si. Our results show that all these systems present the same spectroscopic signatures upon melting, common to those observed for other pure late 3d transition metals. The presented melting criterion seems to be general for late 3d metals bearing systems. Additionally, we demonstrate the suitability of XAS to extract melt compositional information in situ, such as the evolution of the concentration of light elements with increasing temperature. Diagnostics presented in this work can be applied to studies over an even larger pressure range exploiting the upgraded synchrotron machines, and directly transferred to time-resolved extreme condition studies using dynamic compression (ns) or fast laser heating (ms).