Palladium at high pressure and high temperature: Acombined experimental and theoretical study

Palladium is one of the most important technological materials, yet its phase diagram remains poorly understood. At ambient conditions, its solid phase is face-centered cubic (fcc). However, another solid phase of Pd, body-centered cubic (bcc), was very recently predicted in two independent theoretical studies to occur at high pressures and temperatures. In this work, we report an experimental study on the room-temperature equation of state (EOS) of Pd to a pressure of 80 GPa, as well as a theoretical study on the phase diagram of Pd including both fcc-Pd and bcc-Pd. Our theoretical approach consists in ab initio quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations based on the Z methodology which combines both direct Z method for the simulation of melting curves and inverse Z method for the calculation of solid-solid phase transition boundaries. We obtain the melting curves of both fcc-Pd and bcc-Pd and an equation for the fcc-bcc solid-solid phase transition boundary as well as the thermal EOS of Pd which is in agreement with experimental data and QMD simulations. We uncover the presence of another solid phase of Pd on its phase diagram, namely, random hexagonal close-packed (rhcp), and estimate the location of the rhcp-bcc solid-solid phase transition boundary and the rhcp-fcc-bcc triple point. We also discuss the topological similarity of the phase diagrams of palladium and silver, the neighbor of Pd in the periodic table. We argue that Pd is a reliable standard for shock-compression studies and present the analytic model of its principal Hugoniot in a wide pressure range.