Resistance heating of Fe and W in diamond-anvil cells

A new method for internally heating a diamond-anvil cell is described. Fine wires of iron or tungsten are resistively heated in a gasketed cell, thus providing a uniformly distributed pressure that can be measured in situ by employing the ruby scale. Temperatures of several thousand degrees have been measured by fitting a black body radiation function to the spectrum of the hot wire taken with an optical multichannel analyzer. Temperatures as high as the melting temperature of tungsten have been achieved. The alpha-gamma and alpha-epsilon phase transitions of iron have been studied, and the results show excellent agreement with previous data obtained with piston-cylinder or externally-heated diamond cells.