High-temperaturein situRietveld study of Fe,Mg cation partitioning in olivine

Abstract

A natural olivine sample from a mantle peridotite xenolith has been studied byin situhigh-temperature powder diffraction. The structure has been successfully refined from powder data at three temperatures (25, 600, and 800 °C) using the Rietveld method. The study shows that the full-profile technique is well suited for the structure analysis of high-temperature powder diffraction data. The results indicate that, in this temperature range, there is no significant ordering of the Fe,Mg cations in the two crystallographically independent octahedral sites. This has implications for the thermodynamic modeling of olivine at upper mantle conditions. The present experiments allowed measurement of the lattice thermal expansion of olivine in the temperature range 25–800 °C, and assessment of the temperature dependence of the isotropic atomic displacement parameters.