High-pressure evolution of the refractive index of MgO up to 140 GPa

Refractive index provides fundamental insights into the electronic structure of materials. At high pressure, however, the determination of refractive index and its wavelength dispersion is challenging, which limits our understanding of how physical properties of even simple materials, such as MgO, evolve with pressure. Here, we report on the measurement of room-temperature refractive index of MgO up to ∼140 GPa. The refractive index of MgO at 600 nm decreases by ∼2.4% from ∼1.737 at 1 atm to ∼1.696 (±0.017) at ∼140 GPa. Despite the index at 600 nm is essentially pressure independent, the absolute wavelength dispersion of the refractive index at 550–870 nm decreases by ∼28% from ∼0.015 at 1 atm to ∼0.011 (±8.04 × 10−4) at ∼103 GPa. Single-effective-oscillator analysis of our refractive index data suggests that the bandgap of MgO increases by ∼1.1 eV from 7.4 eV at 1 atm to ∼8.5 (±0.6) eV at ∼103 GPa.