Melting of iron under Earth's core conditions from diffusion Monte Carlo free energy calculations.

The temperature of Earth's core is a parameter of critical importance to model the thermal structure of Earth. Since the core is mainly made of iron, with a solid liquid boundary (the inner core boundary) at 1220 km from the center of the Earth, the melting temperature of iron at the pressure of the ICB provides constraints on the temperature of the core. These constraints are based either on extrapolations to ICB pressure of experimental measurements, or on theoretical calculations which employed various flavors of quantum mechanics, most notably density functional theory. Significant disagreement between estimates obtained with different methods calls for calculations based on more accurate techniques. Here we used quantum Monte Carlo techniques to compute the free energies of solid and liquid iron at ICB conditions. We obtained an iron melting temperature at 330 GPa of 6900+/-400 K.