Accepted Tuesday Oct 20, 2009
X-ray diffraction measurements were carried out for liquid iron near the melting temperature and atomic configurations were constructed from the structure factor S(Q) newly obtained, by reverse Monte Carlo modeling and Monte Carlo simulation with the effective pair potential deduced by the inverse method. The bond-orientational order parameter [^W]6 calculated from the atomic configurations obtained from both simulations indicates a pronounced icosahedral ordering, and the fraction of nearly icosahedral configurations is estimated to be approximately 14 % in liquid iron. These experimentally obtained results seem consistent with recent results of ab initio molecular dynamics simulation for liquid iron [P. Ganesh and M. Widom, Phys. Rev. B 77, 014205 (2008)].