Iron at high negative pressures

With the object of verifying the presence of a region of anomalous iron compressibility at negative pressures, as predicted by the ab initio calculations, the reflection of compression pulses from the surfaces of iron single crystals was detected. No evidence of the expected formation of rarefaction shock waves was observed in the range of attained tensile stresses up to 7.6 GPa. The breaking stresses achieved 25-50% of the theoretical iron ultimate strength for a load duration of ∼10⁻⁸ s. The dependence of breaking strength on the extension rate did not reveal any singularities in the region of assumed anomaly in iron compressibility.