TITLE:
The Zinc Story under High Pressure
AUTHORS:
Kenichi Takemura
KEYWORDS:
Zinc, High Pressure, Crystal Structure, Electronic Topological Transition
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Minerals and Materials Characterization and Engineering,
Vol.7 No.5,
September
25,
2019
ABSTRACT: A historical review is presented on the experimental and theoretical studies on Zn under high pressure. Based on our high-pressure powder x-ray diffraction experiments that have been done for nearly a decade, we describe the structural change of Zn up to 126 GPa at room temperature. Although several experimental and theoretical studies indicated an anomalous change of the c/a axial ratio with pressure, we found no such an anomaly within our experimental uncertainty. Our high-pressure low-temperature experiments up to 18 GPa at 40 K also gave no evidence of the c/a anomaly. We suspect that the pressure-transmitting media played an important role in producing the anomaly. The structural anisotropy of Zn is drastically reduced at high pressures, which would be a general trend for hexagonal close-packed (hcp) metals.