Potassium carbonate under pressure: common structural trend for alkaline carbonates and binary compounds

Abstract

The behaviour of alkaline carbonates at high pressure is poorly understood. Indeed, theoretical and experimental investigations of general trends of pressure induced structural changes appear in the literature only sporadically. In this article we use a combination of ab-initio calculations and high-pressure experiments in diamond anvil cell to determine crystal structures of high-pressure phases of K2CO3. The comparison with experimental data on Li2CO3 allows to reconstruct the common structural trend, which is consistent with the simple rule that the structure of high-pressure polymorph is the same as the ambient structure of a heavier element compound from the same group of the periodic table. The correctness of the constructed trend is confirmed by the perfect consistency with pressure-induced structural transformations in a wide range of binary A2B compounds.