Melting curve of iron: The never-ending story?

For the better general understanding of melting behavior at high pressure, we investigated the influence of both crystallographic and electronic structure, and compressibility on melting temperatures for a large class of materials. In particular, we have established a large data base for melting of transition metals to megabar pressures. In general, bcc metals (e.g. W, Ta, Mo, V, Cr) have very flat melting curves, and tire initially steeper melting curves of fcc metals (Fe, Co, Ni) flatten significantly at high pressure. We also observed this trend for the more complicated alkaline earth, and rare earth metals. The flattening of the melting curves is due to the similarity of the solid and liquid structures and volumes. For iron there may exist an additional complication which may explain the reported results on both melting temperatures and structures. Due to the similarity in the free energies of its high pressure structures, these may coexist over a large pressure range. This phenomenon has been recently documented for noble gases with similar structures.