Magnesium Oxide Melting Point

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Research Article

Magnesium oxide (MgO) is a common raw material in ceramics. It is used to produce a pleasant’vellum’ and ‘hares fur’ tactile and visual effect in reduction firings of fine grained glazes such as Dolomite matte, but it is also a very effective refractory stabilizing agent. At lower temperatures it stiffens glazes and causes them to opacify through a mechanism known as’matting’. It is commonly sourced from magnesium carbonate and used in amounts of up to 0.4 molar to prevent the formation of crazing cracks in glazes containing high concentrations of boron or very slow silica.

Investigations of the melting behaviour of terrestrial materials under extreme pressure and temperature are important for constraining magma ocean generation and subsequent chemical differentiation processes in Earth’s deep interior1. However, the maximum pressure generated by conventional multianvil technology using tungsten carbide second-stage anvils limits experimental conditions to less than 30 GPa2.

To address this limitation, we have employed a newly developed technique based on sintered polycrystalline diamond anvils to generate pressures up to 100 GPa. We have successfully demonstrated the melting of peridotite in two separate experiments under these conditions and show that the melting temperatures determined by earlier laser-heated diamond anvil cell (LHDAC) experiments do not agree with those obtained by dynamic compressions or theoretical predictions. The discrepancy is largely due to a misjudgment of the melting point by earlier LHDAC studies based on incorrect interpretation of micro-texture observations in the quenched samples.