Electron–electron scattering and thermal conductivity of ε-iron at Earth’s core conditions

The electronic state and transport properties of hot dense iron are of the utmost importance for the understanding of Earth’s interior. Combining state-of-the-art density functional and dynamicalmean field theories we study the impact of electron correlations on the electrical and thermal resistivity of hexagonal close-packed ò-Fe at Earth’s core conditions and show that the electron–electron scattering in ò-Fe exhibit a nearly perfect Fermi-liquid (FL) behavior. Accordingly, the quadratic dependence of the scattering rate, typical of FLs, leads to amodification of theWiedemann–Franz law and suppresses the thermal conductivity with respect to the electrical one. The consequence is a significant increase of the electron–electron thermal resistivity, which is found to be of comparablemagnitude to the electron–phonon one.