A Comparative Analysis of Evaporate Sediments on Earth and Mars: Implications for the Climate Change on Mars

The knowledge of Martian salts has gone through substantial changes during the past decades. In the 70th of last century, Viking landers have noticed the existence of salts on Mars. Several salt species have been suggested from then on, such as sulfates and chlorides. However, their origin was a mystery due to the lack of observations. The recent explorations and related studies at the beginning of this century revealed that the crustal composition of Mars is similar to that of Earth, and it was hypothesized that almost one third of Martian surface was covered by oceans and lakes in the early stage of Mars. The huge water bodies may have dissolved a large quantity of ions from Martian primary rocks during the whole Noachian and Hesperian epoch. After the enormous drought event happened during the late Hesperian and the early Amazonian, these dissolved ions have formed huge salts deposits and most of them were preserved on Mars until today. To date, carbonates, sulfates, chlorides have all been detected by orbital remote sensing and by landers and rovers. However, the salt mineral assemblages on Mars seems to have some differences from those on Earth, e.g., rich in sulfates and lack of massive carbonates. To explain this difference, we propose that most of the surface carbonates precipitated from the ancient oceans may have been dissolved by the later ubiquitous acidic fluids originated from the global volcanism in the Hesperian era, and formed the enormous sulfate deposits as detected, and this hypothesis seems to be supported by the evidence that most of the sulfate deposits distribute around the Tharsis volcanic province while the survived carbonates located far from it. This process can release most of the carbon on Mars to the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and then be erased by the late heavy bombardments, which might have profound influence on the climate change happened in the Hesperian age. The positive correlation between the GRS results of the potassium distributions and the distribution of chlorides on Mars, together with the high Br concentration measured from the evaporate sediments at two Mars exploration rover landing sites, indicate that the brines in the regions where the chlorides deposited may have reached the stage for potassium salts deposition, thus we propose for the first time that potassium salts deposits might be prevalent in these regions.

Disentangling the electron-lattice dichotomy of the excitonic insulating phase in Ta_(2)Ni(Se_(1-x)S_(x))_(5) with sulfur substitution and potassium deposition

Ta_(2)NiSe_(5) is a promising candidate for hosting an excitonic insulator(EI)phase,a novel electronic state driven by electron-hole Coulomb attraction.However,the role of electron-lattice coupling in the formation of the EI phase remains controversial.Here,we use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy(ARPES)to study the band structure evolution of Ta_(2)Ni(Se_(1-x)S_(x))_(5) with sulfur substitution and potassium deposition,which modulate the band gap and the carrier concentration,respectively.We find that the Ta 5d states originating from the bottom of the conduction band persist at the top of the valence band in the low-temperature monoclinic phase,indicating the importance of exciton condensation in opening the gap in the semi-metallic band structure.We also observe that the characteristic overlap between the conduction and valence bands can be restored in the monoclinic lattice by mild carrier injection,suggesting that the lattice distortion in the monoclinic phase is not the main factor for producing the insulating gap,but rather the exciton condensation in the electronic system is the dominant driving force.Our results shed light on the electron-lattice decoupling and the origin of the EI phase in Ta_(2)Ni(Se_(1-x)Sx)_(5).