A team of experimental and computational scientists led by the Geophysical Laboratory’s Tim Strobel and Venkata Bhadram have synthesized a long sought-after form of titanium nitride, Ti3N4, which has promising mechanical and optoelectronic properties.
Piezoelectric materials are a class of smart materials that can convert electrical energy to mechanical energy and vice versa. Developing new piezoelectrics for novel electromechanical device applications has been a long-lasting interest, both scientifically and technologically. The negative response has been considered a rare and counterintuitive anomaly. The Geophysical Laboratory's Shi Liu and Ron Cohen showed that the negative response is not so rare after all.
Washington, DC— Reservoirs of oxygen-rich iron between the Earth’s core and mantle could have played a major role in Earth’s history, including the breakup of supercontinents, drastic changes in Earth’s atmospheric makeup, and the creation of life, according to recent work from an international research team published in National Science Review.
Washington, DC— New research by GL's Dave Mao on oxygen and iron chemistry under the extreme conditions found deep inside the Earth could explain a longstanding seismic mystery called ultralow velocity zones. Published in Nature, the findings could have far-reaching implications on our understanding of Earth’s geologic history, including life-altering events such as the Great Oxygenation Event, which occurred 2.4 billion years ago.
Washington, DC— A team of Geophysical Laboratory high-pressure physicists have created a form of carbon that’s hard as diamond, but amorphous, meaning it lacks the large-scale structural repetition of a diamond’s crystalline structure. Their findings are reported in Nature Communications.
The properties of hydrogen at extreme pressures and temperatures are of great interest to condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and planetary science due to the element’s putative
Our science cannot be accomplished without state-of-the-art instruments. But sometimes the existing tools simply aren’t enough.
Washington, DC — A group of scientists led by the Geophysical Laboratory's Huiyang Gou and Timothy Strobel performed high-pressure experiments on linear dicyanoacetylene (C4N2) using a diamond anvil cell, in which a pressure-induced reaction process was uncovered. Discrete linear C4N2 molecules were found to polymerize into a disordered extended network without significant change to the bulk composition.
Washington, DC—Applying big data analysis to mineralogy offers a way to predict minerals missing from those known to science, as well as where to find new deposits, according to a groundbreaking study.
In a paper published by American Mineralogist, Geophysical Laboratory scientists Shaunna Morrison and Bob Hazen report the first application to mineralogy of network theory (best known for analysis of e.g. the spread of disease, terrorist networks, or Facebook connections).
Washington, DC— A team including several Geophysical Laboratory scientists has developed a form of ultrastrong, lightweight carbon that is also elastic and electrically conductive. A material with such a unique combination of properties could serve a wide variety of applications from aerospace engineering to military armor.
