Journal
NATURE
Volume 517, Issue 7536, Pages 605-U376Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature14090
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Funding
- National Science Foundation (NSF) [EAR-1214807, DMS-1025392, DMR-1405303]
- Carnegie Institution
- European Research Council Advanced Grant ToMCaT
- NSF [DMR-1405303]
- Office of Science of the US Department of Energy [DE-AC05-000R22725]
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Materials Research [1405303] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Division Of Earth Sciences [1214807] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Earth's magnetic field has been thought to arise from thermal convection of molten iron alloy in the outer core, but recent density functional theory calculations have suggested that the conductivity of iron is too high to support thermal convection(1-4), resulting in the investigation of chemically driven convection(5,6). These calculations for resistivity were based on electron-phonon scattering. Here we apply self-consistent density functional theory plus dynamical meanfield theory (DFT+DMFT)(7) to iron and find that at high temperatures electron-electron scattering iscomparable to the electron-phonon scattering, bringing theory into agreement with experiments and solving the transport problem in Earth's core. The conventional thermal dynamo picture is safe. We find that electron-electron scattering of d electrons is important at high temperatures in transition metals, in contrast to textbook analyses since Mott(8,9), and that 4s electron contributions to transport are negligible, in contrast to numerous models used for over fifty years. The DFT+DMFT method should be applicable to other high-temperature systems where electron correlations are important.
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