Carnegie Institution

Argonne National Laboratory and Carnegie Institution

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Contact: Catherine Foster at Argonne National Laboratory, 630-252-5580, e-mail cfoster@anl.gov; or Tina McDowell at Carnegie Institution, 202-939-1120 or 1101, e-mail tmcdowell@ciw.edu

New Era Begins for High-Pressure Materials Research at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source

ARGONNE, Ill. – A great boost in high-pressure research, a fast moving field in modern science, will take place July 26, 2002, with the dedication of the newest research facility at the Advanced Photon Source at 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 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 W. M. Keck Foundation, the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Foundation, the Richard W. Higgins Foundation, the University of Hawaii, and anonymous.

The Advanced Photon Source, 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 Sciences. Researchers from around the world use the Advanced Photon Source for all types of research that require extraordinarily bright light —from biology and geology to fundamental physics and chemistry. 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, 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,” Mao said. “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.”

(Imagery available at http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/CarnegieHPCAT.HTML)

The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory conducts basic and applied scientific research across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to climatology and biotechnology. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies and numerous federal agencies and other organizations to help advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for the future. The University of Chicago operates Argonne as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratory system.

Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institution in 1902. Today, 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, California; and the Carnegie Observatories, based in Pasadena, California, with its principal observing location at the institution's Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. For more information about the Carnegie Institution, see the Web site http://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 then University of California for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.