High-Pressure, High-Temperature Behavior of Silicon Carbide: A Review

The high-pressure behavior of silicon carbide (SiC), a hard, semi-conducting material commonly known for its many polytypic structures and refractory nature, has increasingly become the subject of current research. Through work done both experimentally and computationally, many interesting aspects of high-pressure SiC have been measured and explored. Considerable work has been done to measure the effect of pressure on the vibrational and material properties of SiC. Additionally, the transition from the low-pressure zinc-blende B3 structure to the high-pressure rocksalt B1 structure has been measured by several groups in both the diamond-anvil cell and shock communities and predicted in numerous computational studies. Finally, high-temperature studies have explored the thermal equation of state and thermal expansion of SiC, as well as the high-pressure and high-temperature melting behavior. From high-pressure phase transitions, phonon behavior, and melting characteristics, our increased knowledge of SiC is improving our understanding of its industrial uses, as well as opening up its application to other fields such as the Earth sciences.