  Recent observations of rocky super-Earths have revealed an apparent wider
distribution of Fe/Mg ratios, or core to mantle ratios, than the planets in our
Solar System. This study aims to understand how much of the chemical diversity
in the super-Earth population can arise from giant impacts during planetary
formation. Planet formation simulations have only recently begun to treat
collisions more realistically in an attempt to replicate the planets in our
Solar System. We investigate planet formation more generally by simulating the
formation of rocky super-Earths with varying initial conditions using a version
of SyMBA, a gravitational N-body code, that incorporates realistic collisions.
We track the maximum plausible change in composition after each impact. The
final planets span a range of Fe/Mg ratios similar to the Solar System planets,
but do not completely match the distribution in super-Earth data. We only form
a few planets with minor iron-depletion, suggesting other mechanisms are at
work. The most iron-rich planets have a lower Fe/Mg ratio than Mercury, and are
less enriched than planets such as Kepler-100b. This indicates that further
work on our understanding of planet formation and further improvement of
precision of mass and radius measurements are required to explain planets at
the extremes of this Fe/Mg distribution.
