Sodium-potassium system at high pressure

Mixtures of sodium and potassium differ substantially from the pure elements, while retaining the high compressibility, which is important to the complex behavior of dense alkali metals. We present powder x-ray diffraction of mixtures of Na and K compressed in diamond anvil cells to 48 GPa at 295 K. This reveals two stoichiometric intermetallics: an Na₂K phase known at ambient pressure and low temperature, and a novel NaK phase formed of interpenetrating sodium and potassium diamond lattices. Density functional theory calculations find the new phase to be dynamically stable and, in contrast to pure alkali metals, reveal decreasing electron localization with applied pressure. Depending on the mixture composition these intermetallics are accompanied by sodium or potassium rich phases suggesting that there are no other intermetallics under the range of P-T conditions studied. Alkali-metal mixtures have seen little study at high pressure and represent an unusual class of materials with very high compressibility and multiple constituents. Such materials exhibit significant compression at experimentally accessible pressures and open a way to measure multispecies structures at high compression. These results challenge structural finding algorithms for mixtures in high-pressure conditions.