Paper on the low thermal conductivity of Fe-Si alloys published in Nature Communications

Wen-Pin Hsieh’s paper, co-authored by Alex Goncharov, Nicholas Holtgrewe, Sergey S. Lobanov, Irina Chuvashova, Frédéric Deschamps, Jung-Fu Lin and myself is published in Nature Communications. Wen-Pin and his colleagues made new measurements of thermal conductivity of Fe-Si alloys and obtained values much lower than some previously published results. The debate is still going on but, clearly, such low values of the conductivity allow the geodynamo to run on heat for most of its history without the need for a very high initial temperature. You can read the paper on the journal’s webpage.