NEW ERA FOR HIGH-PRESSURE MATERIALS RESEARCH AT ADVANCED PHOTON SOURCE
26 July 2005 - DOE/Argonne National Laboratory

HP-CAT, the High Pressure Collaborative Access Team, will be used to study how materials react and change under high pressure and varying temperatures. Team Director David Mao of the Carnegie Institution of Washington predicts that the new high-pressure facility at the Advanced Photon Source "will unleash the full potential of high-pressure methods for materials research, including the quest for novel superconductors and superhard materials, the search for scientific knowledge of nuclear stockpile and energetic materials, the exploration of new physical properties inside highly compressed, hot planetary interiors, and the tests of hypotheses of high-pressure origins of life."

HP-CAT is made up of researchers from the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory; the High-Pressure Physics Group of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and the High Pressure Science and Engineering Center of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Support for this project comes from the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the Keck Foundation, the Vetlesen Foundation, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Foundation, and the University of Hawaii. The APS, which produces the nation's most brilliant X-ray beams for research, is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Science.

Researchers from around the world use the APS for all types of research, from biology and geology to fundamental physics and chemistry, that require extraordinarily bright light. Collaborative access teams, groups of researchers from academia, industry, and research laboratories, design and build their own specialized instrumentation for specific uses. These instruments are used by members of the CAT and by unaffiliated experimenters whose research can benefit from a CAT's instrumentation and from APS X-ray beams.

The new HP-CAT research facility will advance high-pressure science by allowing new types of experiments to be performed including complete crystallographic studies of materials at multimegabar pressures; measurements of the dynamics of electrons, atoms, and nuclei; and detailed studies of complex materials as functions of pressure, temperature, and time.

In addition, Mao said, new-generation high-pressure devices such as large-volume diamond-anvil cells will all be exploited. Researchers will be able to study local chemical environments, including atomic coordination, structures, and bonding character, with a wide variety of X-ray spectroscopies.

"Thus far," Mao said, "high-pressure X-ray spectroscopy has been hindered by insufficient synchrotron radiation intensity and by the opaqueness of high-pressure vessels at crucial X-ray energies. With the dramatic improvements in X-ray intensity offered by the APS and X-ray transparent ultra-high-pressure cell components, the new facility opens a window on a previously unavailable energy range."

Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1902. The institution operates six research centers: the Geophysical Laboratory and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, both in Washington, D.C.; the Department of Embryology in Baltimore; the Department of Plant Biology and the Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif.; and the Carnegie Observatories, based in Pasadena, Calif., with its principal observing location at the institution's Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. For more information about the Carnegie Institution, see the Web site at www.CarnegieInstitution.org.

UNLV is a doctoral-degree-granting institution with some 24,000 students and more than 700 faculty members. More than 180 undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees are offered. Founded in 1957, UNLV is located on 337 acres in dynamic Southern Nevada. The university has been ranked in the category of Doctoral/Research Universities-Intensive by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was established in 1952 to meet an urgent national security need by advancing nuclear weapons science and technology. Fifty years later, the laboratory's primary mission is still national security, through the stockpile stewardship program, nonproliferation and counter terrorism to reduce threats and dangers to the nation. In addition to meeting these security needs, the laboratory is world-renowned for its research and development in energy and environmental science ,computational science, physics, engineering and biotechnology. The laboratory is managed by the University of California for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

http://www.anl.gov

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