Single crystal growth, characterization and high-pressure Raman spectroscopy of impurity-free magnesite (MgCO3)

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 μm, 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 \(R\bar {3}c\) 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, ν i, without any splitting increased almost linearly with increasing pressure. In combination with the high-pressure Raman results \(\frac{{{\text{d}}{\nu _i}}}{{{\text{d}}P}}\) 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, ν 4, and ν 1) were calculated.