High-pressure elastic properties of major materials of Earth’s mantle from first principles, Rev

Abstract. The elasticity of materials is important for our understanding of processes ranging from brittle fail-ure, to flexure, to the propagation of elastic waves. Seismologically revealed structure of the Earth’s mantle, including the radial (one-dimensional) profile, lateral heterogeneity, and anisotropy are determined largely by the elasticity of the materials that make up this region. Despite its importance to geophysics, our knowledge of the elasticity of potentially relevant mineral phases at conditions typical of the Earth’s mantle is still limited: Measuring the elastic constants at elevated pressure-temperature conditions in the laboratory remains a ma-jor challenge. Over the past several years, another ap-proach has been developed based on first-principles quantum mechanical theory. First-principles calcula