Comment on “Molybdenum sound velocity and shear modulus softening under shock compression”

In this Comment we discuss recent results presented by Nguyen et al. on shock compressed molybdenum up to 438 GPa [Phys. Rev. B 89, 174109 (2014)]. The aim of Nguyen's article is to show that there is no phase transition near 210 GPa. We propose instead an interpretation of their data that this material shows the onset of partial melting along the Hugoniot at $240(20)\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{GPa}$, which is evident from abrupt changes in the pressure dependence of the shear modulus. This interpretation may solve the significant controversy in the melting slopes derived from shock and static experiments.

X-ray diffraction measurements of Mo melting to 119 GPa and the high pressure phase diagram

In this paper, we report angle-dispersive X-ray diffraction data of molybdenum melting, measured in a double-sided laser-heated diamond-anvil cell up to a pressure of 119 GPa and temperatures up to 3400 K. The new melting temperatures are in excellent agreement with earlier measurements up to 90 GPa that relied on optical observations of melting and in strong contrast to most theoretical estimates. The X-ray measurements show that the solid melts from the bcc structure throughout the reported pressure range and provide no evidence for a high temperature transition from bcc to a close-packed structure, or to any other crystalline structure. This observation contradicts earlier interpretation…

Melting of transition metals at high pressure and the influence of liquid frustration: The early metals Ta and Mo

Microscopic evidence of a flat melting curve of tantalum

International audience; New data on the high-pressure melting curve of Ta up to 48GPa are reported. Evidence of melting from changes in sample texture was found in five different experiments using scanning electron microscopy. The obtained melting temperatures are in excellent agreement with earlier measurements using x-ray diffraction or the laser-speckled method but are in contrast with several theoretical calculations. The results are also compared with shock-wave data. These findings are of geophysical relevance because they confirm the validity of earlier experimental techniques that resulted in low melting slopes of the transition metals measured in the diamond-anvil cell, including i…