The structure of liquid SnTe under pressure.

We investigated the structure of liquid SnTe at high pressures up to 8.2 GPa by energy-dispersive x-ray diffraction. On melting at low pressures, the crystalline B1 structure changed into not B1-like but distorted-B1-like local structure. We also found that the structure changes at around 1.6–3.3 GPa. At high pressures, the bond angle and coordination number approached those for B2-based structure, but still showed clear deviations from B2-like local structure.