† Corresponding author. E-mail:
Many properties of planets such as their interior structure and thermal evolution depend on the high-pressure properties of their constituent materials. This paper reviews how crystal structure prediction methodology can help shed light on the transformations materials undergo at the extreme conditions inside planets. The discussion focuses on three areas: (i) the propensity of iron to form compounds with volatile elements at planetary core conditions (important to understand the chemical makeup of Earthʼs inner core), (ii) the chemistry of mixtures of planetary ices (relevant for the mantle regions of giant icy planets), and (iii) examples of mantle minerals. In all cases the abilities and current limitations of crystal structure prediction are discussed across a range of example studies.
Understanding the interior makeup of and the dynamical processes within the planets in our and other solar systems is a central research focus in geo- and planetary sciences. Quantifying planets’ bulk chemical composition is essential to distinguishing and validating models of planetary formation and thermal evolution over the lifetime of the solar system. More detailed pictures of stratification inside planets are necessary to understand planets’ ability to harbour life—from establishing stable planetary magnetic fields by dynamos of convecting conducting material to sustaining surface water by plate tectonics and deep water storage. At the heart of these phenomena are the properties of materials (elastic, conductive, etc.) under high-pressure and -temperature conditions as found inside planetary bodies. These states of matter are mostly solid (about 85% of Earthʼs volume, 70% of its mass, are in the solid state) and they are not easily accessible by direct observation or laboratory experiments. Accurate calculations are therefore indispensable to assist or guide experimental efforts. Crystal structure prediction (CSP) has emerged as a very versatile and useful tool in surveying properties of materials under high-pressure conditions, in particular if combined with accurate density functional theory (DFT) calculations.[1] Materials systems relevant to geosciences come with their own challenges, these are discussed in more detail in the next section. However, CSP also offers unique opportunities to the field. It successfully challenges conventional chemical beliefs by uncovering new paradigms about reactivity that run counter to the chemical intuition trained at ambient conditions. It can uncover important phase transitions that in turn lead to new phase relations with severe geochemical implications. And it provides starting points (through the most relevant solid structures) for additional computational studies, e.g., molecular dynamics, that can explore high-temperature phenomena.
In this brief review, we aim to discuss some the successes of CSP, in particular from the CALYPSO code,[2] in various areas of geoscientific interest. We begin by outlining in Section 2 some of the unique challenges faced by CSP if applied to the geoscience context. In Section 3 we discuss the application of CSP to understand planetary core materials, via the incorporation of volatile elements in iron-rich solid cores. In Section 4 we discuss CSP applications to the mantle regions of icy planets, and in Section 5 the mantle regions of rocky planets. Section
CSP faces some rather unique challenges if applied to geologically relevant scenarios. There are over 5000 classified minerals.[3] This might not seem terribly many: databases hold over 500 unique allotropes of carbon alone,[4] over 200000 inorganic (ICSD[5]) and over 1000000 organic and metal-organic structures (CSD[6]). However, minerals come with an unusual chemical complexity: many minerals contain four or more different elements (minerals with over 20 elements have been reported[7]). This increases the dimensionality of the crystalline configuration space, which is the bottleneck for an efficient application of CSP. The minerals we know are exclusively from our studies of Earthʼs crust and mantle and from meteorites. It is very likely that other environments (e.g., icy worlds, rocky planets with different chemical composition, or even the lower depths of Earth) will support a wide range of other mineral materials. One potential avenue to restrict the computational cost of structure searches in such complicated settings is to exploit common structural features of minerals such as regular polyhedral coordination: silicon usually appears at the center of SiO4 tetrahedra or (at high pressures) SiO6 octahedra. Constructing structural candidates from such reasonable building blocks instead of individual atoms would reduce the number of irrelevant structures considerably; of course the CSP code needs to support such features and correctly interpret their presence when deducing the next generation of candidates; and one must ensure that such “chemical coarsening” does not restrict the searches at the conditions in question. This process can be automated[8] and combined with machine-learning (ML) techniques to train computationally cheap interaction potentials[9,10] to explore much larger and more complex structures than hitherto possible.
As a second key property, materials in geological environments invariably encounter high temperatures. CSP usually produces ground state results, applying the ‘clamped-nuclei’ approximation to obtain the electronic and Ewald energies of the solid state structures. At finite temperature, entropy can play a decisive role in stabilising certain materials: this could be configurational entropy due to atomic disorder, or vibrational entropy due to thermal occupation of lattice vibrations, i.e. phonons. The first case is very relevant for minerals, which often form as solid solutions. For example, alloying of magnesium and iron atoms is common because the ionic radii of Mg2+ and Fe2+ are very similar. Materials that are stabilised by the resulting configurational entropy are hard to capture with the default CSP approach that uses the enthalpy,
Despite these challenges, CSP is beginning to make an impact in the field of geosciencess, as the case studies in the following sections will illustrate.
Earthʼs solid inner core is dominated by an iron-rich Fe-Ni alloy[11,12] but its overall density is significantly lower than expected from such an alloy. The core must therefore contain some light elements, dissolved at the single per cent level. The main candidates, from chemical and geochemical arguments, are H, C, O, Si, P, and S.[13,14] Most of these elements form one or more stoichiometric compounds with iron and/or nickel;[15] these have been studied extensively by experiment and ab initio calculations. CSP arguably has less of a role to play for these (often quite simple) compounds, yet it has meaningfully contributed to the study of several binary Fe–X phase diagrams. We will discuss these in turn below.
While both experiments and calculations have made great strides in studies of volatile elements interacting with iron, there are many more challenges ahead before a full understanding of the composition of heavy planetary cores can emerge. Other light elements could be present in the core, with magnesium a prime candidate; more studies are needed on Mg–Fe mixtures, which might tilt the balance of whether magnesium can partition in iron instead of silicates.[15] The ternary phase diagrams Fe–Ni–X for some volatile element X might look different than both the binary phase diagrams Fe–X or Ni–X, and this would further influence the volatiles’ propensity to form compounds in a core of Earthʼs composition.[53] And super-Earth exoplanets might require thinking about much more extreme pressure conditions in their cores.[54] These are formidable challenges but CSP is well poised to help answer these questions.
The interiors of giant icy planets, such as Uranus and Neptune in our solar system, are altogether quite different environments. Their mantle regions comprise mixtures of molecular ices of water, ammonia and methane, together with impurities and volatiles such as hydrogen or helium. Similar mixtures are presumed to occur prominently in the large number of Neptune-like exoplanets discovered by recent and ongoing astronomical observation campaigns.[55–59]
Little is known how the molecular ingredients arrange themselves within these planetary bodies. They could segregate to form layers of distinct compositions, or homogeneous mixtures at roughly the overall chemical composition ratio.
CSP has tremendously expanded our knowledge about individual ices’ response to high-pressure conditions. For water, the cubic phase ice-X was for decades the highest pressure phase known[63] before a DFT molecular dynamics study in 1996 suggested a transition of ice-X to an orthorhombic Pbcm phase around 300 GPa.[64] Phases beyond the Pbcm phase were successfully constructed manually in 2010,[65] but immediately following that work a series of papers explored water into the TPa pressure range using CSP and converged on a very rich phase diagram that features layered structures, metallic phases, and scope for decomposition of water into H2O2 and H-intercalated water phases.[60–62,66,67] This series of CSP studies allows for interesting insight into this type of research: even though several groups found a specific high-pressure phase of ice, of
partial ionisation (the formation of (H3O)+(OH)−),[60] another saw hexagonal close packing of oxygen, slightly distorted by the presence of protons,[61] and yet another saw the emergence of higher coordination, the deviation from tetrahedral connectivity so dominant in ice phases.[62] Even though CSP gave the same structure, our understanding of the underlying physics and chemistry can depend a lot on the researchers’ point of view; it is vital to have these different view points and discussions to ultimately form a better picture of the driving forces behind phase transformations and changes in material properties under pressure. The lessons thus learned will be invaluable not just for geosciences but also materials science and solid state chemistry. The ground state phase evolution for water that was established in this way has since formed the foundation for other computational studies, e.g. of waterʼs high-temperature properties and interesting states such as diffusive protons.[68,69] These states are now explored in state-of-the-art dynamic compression experiments.[70,71]
Methane, CH4, follows a very different route under pressure, and our understanding of its P-T phase diagram arguably suffers much more from significant disagreements between theory and experiment. It is likely that a lot of these disagreements are related to the metastability inherent to hydrocarbon chemistry, but also to failures of ab initio methods to survey free energy landscapes accurately. The seminal contribution of CSP to our understanding of methane was made in 2010,[72] when CALYPSO was used to search for high-pressure phases of CH4. A sequence of phase transitions of methane into longer hydrocarbons culminated in the full decomposition into diamond and hydrogen at just below 300 GPa at low temperatures, which should happen much earlier at elevated temperatures. Such a decomposition (or any reaction of methane to form longer hydrocarbons) was not seen in static room temperature compression experiments—either using optical absorption measurements,[73] x-ray diffraction[74] or Raman spectroscopy.[75] However, it was reported that higher temperatures induced polymerisation of methane at around 1100 K, eventually leading to diamond formation at 3000 K and very low pressures of just 10 GPa.[76,77] Since the initial CSP report on methane, a sequence of other works have explored the hydrocarbon (C–H) phase diagram.[78–80] A recent revisit of the phase diagrams of methane and other hydrocarbons assembled all these results for the first time, augmented by additional CSP runs, and pointed to the prominence of molecular van der Waals compounds (CH4)m(H2)n, which are expected to extend the stability regime of CH4 molecules to higher pressures.[81] As a consequence, a full binary phase diagram of C–H compounds can be drawn up, yielding stable hydrocarbon phases as function of pressure, temperature, and composition, see Fig.
Ammonia, NH3, reacts differently again under pressure. In another success for CSP, a sequence of phase transitions to ionic ammonium amide (NH4)+(NH2)− phases was first predicted[85] and subsequently confirmed in experiment.[86,87] A broader study of hydronitrogens predicts the decomposition of NH3 into NH3 and N3H7 above 440 GPa.[88]
A minor component of icy planets is hydrogen sulfide, H2S. A CSP exploration of its high-pressure properties rightly focused on its metallisation and high-Tc superconductivity.[89] Its role within icy planetary bodies, in particular through interactions with other molecular species, could prove quite important, but has not been explored in much detail.
In that context an important question is whether properties of mixtures of these molecular ices can be obtained by averaging over their individual properties—the so-called linear mixing approximation has seen significant successes based on individual molecules’ equations of state[90,91]—or whether molecular mixtures can features unique chemistry that needs to be considered in planetary models.
The low-pressure phase relations amongst the ices of water, methane, and ammonia can be summarised in the ternary phase diagram shown in Fig.
There is currently no CSP study of this full ternary molecular composition space. However, CALYPSO has proved invaluable e.g. in exploring mixtures of ammonia and water under pressure.[96,97] These recent studies reported sequences of new high-pressure phases for the three canonical mixing ratios, as well as the stabilisation of a new ammonia-rich hydrate of 4:1 stoichiometry (ammonia quarter hydrate, AQH). The pervasive feature of the high-pressure phases of these mixtures is proton transfer from water to ammonia. Depending on stoichiometry this results in ammonium hydroxides (
Molecular mixtures should not only comprise the ices introduced above but also their interactions with the lighter compounds, namely hydrogen and helium, which are known to form outer atmospheres of large icy planets. These light species can potentially interact with the molecular ices and lead to interesting interactions at the boundary of the planets’ atmospheres and mantles. Molecular hydrogen is particularly interesting in that regard. We know hydrogen can interact with water, as it forms a sequence of molecular hydrogen hydrates under pressure[92]—and new hydrates with novel water networks are still being reported.[100–102] There is a miscibility gap of H2 and H2O (at least in the solid state) beyond the molecular hydrate phases[103] and a re-emergence of atomic hydrogen interacting with the layered network phases of water at TPa pressures.[67] Hydrogen can also interact with methane to form van der Waals compounds that feature prominently in the predicted phase diagrams of hydrocarbons.[81] These compounds include CH4(H2)2, which has one of the highest releasable hydrogen contents by weight (20%) of any material; albeit at very high pressures. However, arguably the chemically most interesting case is hydrogen mixing with ammonia: a recent CALYPSO CSP study[104] found that NH3(H2)2 is stabilised at relatively low pressures by formation of ammonium,
Figure
Helium can also form mixtures with small molecules. Most prominently, perhaps, its interaction with water at low pressures results in the formation of clathrate hydrates and filled ices.[105,106] Several recent CSP studies reported helium–water mixtures at much higher pressures and found a variety of stable compounds with stoichiometries across 2:1, 1:1, and 1:2.[107–109] These compounds are still dominated by tetrahedral water networks, with their natural cavities occupied by various amounts of helium atoms, see Fig.
At this point in time, CSP studies of compressed planetary ices and their mixtures far outpace the experimental data. In parts this is testament to the difficulty in performing accurate measurements on these systems under pressure—even constraining mixing ratios in sample chambers is very challenging. Nonetheless, there is much left to do for theory: having unearthed a large variety of new compounds and new chemistry in binary systems, will the same hold true for more complex mixtures? And what can be learned if minority species (such as H2S) are considered as part of the mixtures?
The mantle regions of rocky planets differ substantially from the scenarios discussed so far. For once, they are at much less extreme pressure and temperature conditions than planetary cores or the mantles of giant icy planets. On Earth, pressures in the upper mantle reach 13 GPa (at 410 km depth), up to 21 GPa at the mantle transition zone (at 660 km depth), and about 125 GPa at the core-mantle boundary (2900 km depth). The minerals that occupy this region are often dominated by ionic bonding and electronically inert, i.e., wide-gap insulators, which aids calculations. On the other hand, the mantle region is by far the most chemically diverse place of all scenarios discussed in this paper; in fact it is the most chemically diverse region we know in the universe, though that might be biased towards what we can observe. This leads to complicated phase relations between minerals and a plethora of possible chemical reactions, resulting in formation or dissolution of specific compounds. Moreover, many minerals can form solid solutions along continuous chemical substitutions. The simplest example is probably ferropericlase or magnesiowüstite, (Mg,Fe)O, but the same principle also applies to olivine, (Mg,Fe)2SiO4, and garnets,
The processes by which volatile components such as water, carbon, or nitrogen are cycled between the surface layers and the mantle region of Earth are important to understand Earthʼs surface environment.[110–112] Water in particular plays an important role in sustaining and mediating geological activity. The presence of water helps in lowering the mantleʼs melting temperature, enhances diffusion and creep, thus affecting rheology of rocks, and also influences mineral phase boundaries.[113] It is estimated that the Earthʼs mantle contains a mass of water equivalent to the mass of the worldʼs oceans.[114,115] At relatively low pressures and temperatures in Earthʼs crust, in cold subduction zones, water can exist in molecular form, e.g. in clays such as kaolinite.[116] At high-pressure and high-temperature conditions of the mantle, water usually exists in the form of OH− anions and is stored in hydrous or nominally anhydrous minerals.[117,118]
The dominant mantle rock type, peridotite, can be hydrated in this way and the resulting phases can be understood by considering the ternary system of MgO–SiO2–H2O (dense hydrous magnesium silicates, DHMS). A secondary source of hydrous minerals can be found in the ternary system of Al2O3–SiO2–H2O (alumino silicate hydrates, ASH). The known phases in those two systems are shown in Fig.
A successful example of computation aiding minerals discovery is the DHMS phase H, MgSiO2(OH)2, which was first constructed in calculations[119] and subsequently synthesised.[120] The crystal structure of phase H, with the very simple composition 1:1:1 of MgO, SiO2, and H2O, was guessed at by applying one of the ionic substitutions mentioned in the previous section, 2Al
Another successful CSP study explored the high-pressure evolution of brucite, Mg(OH)2, which is arguably the simplest hydrous mineral in the DHMS system.[124] Brucite is the most important MgO–H2O binary phase and, apart from the “3.65Å phase” the most water-rich phase in that mineral system. Its known crystal structure comprises layers of edge-sharing MgO6 octahedra, with OH groups formed at every corner that arrange perpendicular to the layers. There are no hydrogen bonds in this structure, and their emergence under moderate pressures dominated the early high-pressure studies of this material.[125,126] Many metal hydroxides of the form M(OH) or M(OH)2 form layered structures,[127,128] yet under pressure there are often phase transitions to three-dimensional networks with rich hydrogen-bond topologies—CSP has been used successfully to identify these transitions and to corroborate (or even re-interpret) experimental structure solutions.[129–131] For Mg(OH)2, a similar transformation is predicted by CSP to take place (CALYPSO has confirmed these results):[124] the layered brucite structure becomes unstable under pressure and is superseded by a three-dimensional network of corner-sharing polyhedra that is topologically equivalent to TiO2 anatase (see insets in Fig.
The two examples discussed here present the simplest examples for a certain class of mantle minerals. CSP has been able to reveal intriguing phase transitions in both cases, and it stands to reason that its application to more complex mineral compounds will also yield new insights into high-pressure phases with new properties that are relevant in planetary interiors.
Mantle minerals are essentially ionic compounds, much of their stability driven by attractive and repulsive Coulomb interactions between ions of opposite or equal charges. A recent CSP study found that the smallest (and most inert) noble gas element, helium, readily forms compounds with ionic structures of unequal anion/cation numbers.[132] This “reactivity” of helium is not accompanied by the formation of any kind of chemical bonds but rather benefits from helium atoms lowering the Madelung energy of the ionic crystals when inserted between the majority ions. A one-dimensional schematic is shown in Fig.
Crystal structure prediction has lots to offer to geo- and planetary sciences. This research field comes with unique challenges: chemical complexity, the role of high temperature, entropic stabilisation of solid solutions are but some of those. On the experimental side, direct measurements are difficult if not impossible, and laboratory setups need to be tightly constrained to be comparable to CSP calculations. However, across a variety of geological settings CSP has proven a very useful tool. It can be used to study compound formation of iron with volatile elements at planetary core conditions; can predict silicate-dominated minerals in rocky mantles; and help us understand the chemistry and physics inside icy planets. Some results from these areas, with the CALYPSO code heavily involved, were discussed in this review. There are more planetary scenarios where CSP could be applied: exoplanet research only begins to understand the types of planets that could form in other solar systems, and predicting the properties of their potential constituents (e.g., carbon at multi-TPa pressures[136]) is very useful to develop a better understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and the place of our solar system amidst those.
There are recent methodological developments that suggest that CSP will become even more useful for geosciences in the future. A “geochemical coarsening”, based on automated learning of the relevant “building blocks” of minerals and other compounds under specific pressure conditions could lead to great acceleration of structure searching, which would afford an expansion of CSP into more complex chemical composition spaces. Recently, the CALYPSO package has been extended to train on-the-fly interatomic potentials using the Gaussian Approximation Potential (GAP[137]) machine learning (ML) approach.[9] While not yet applied directly to the field of geosciences, the potential speedup of a combined DFT/ML approach holds promise for the future. An interesting question remains on how CSP can be used at finite temperatures, i.e. to produce realistic free energies of materials. It is possible that ML can help with this as well, e.g. by constructing cheap interatomic potentials that allow on-the-fly calculations of dynamical properties and thus vibrational entropies.
[1] | |
[2] | |
[3] | |
[4] | |
[5] | |
[6] | |
[7] | |
[8] | |
[9] | |
[10] | |
[11] | |
[12] | |
[13] | |
[14] | |
[15] | |
[16] | |
[17] | |
[18] | |
[19] | |
[20] | |
[21] | |
[22] | |
[23] | |
[24] | |
[25] | |
[26] | |
[27] | |
[28] | |
[29] | |
[30] | |
[31] | |
[32] | |
[33] | |
[34] | |
[35] | |
[36] | |
[37] | |
[38] | |
[39] | |
[40] | |
[41] | |
[42] | |
[43] | |
[44] | |
[45] | |
[46] | |
[47] | |
[48] | |
[49] | |
[50] | |
[51] | |
[52] | |
[53] | |
[54] | |
[55] | |
[56] | |
[57] | |
[58] | |
[59] | |
[60] | |
[61] | |
[62] | |
[63] | |
[64] | |
[65] | |
[66] | |
[67] | |
[68] | |
[69] | |
[70] | |
[71] | |
[72] | |
[73] | |
[74] | |
[75] | |
[76] | |
[77] | |
[78] | |
[79] | |
[80] | |
[81] | |
[82] | |
[83] | |
[84] | |
[85] | |
[86] | |
[87] | |
[88] | |
[89] | |
[90] | |
[91] | |
[92] | |
[93] | |
[94] | |
[95] | |
[96] | |
[97] | |
[98] | |
[99] | |
[100] | |
[101] | |
[102] | |
[103] | |
[104] | |
[105] | |
[106] | |
[107] | |
[108] | |
[109] | |
[110] | |
[111] | |
[112] | |
[113] | |
[114] | |
[115] | |
[116] | |
[117] | |
[118] | |
[119] | |
[120] | |
[121] | |
[122] | |
[123] | |
[124] | |
[125] | |
[126] | |
[127] | |
[128] | |
[129] | |
[130] | |
[131] | |
[132] | |
[133] | |
[134] | |
[135] | |
[136] | |
[137] |