The Mission of the NSF Center for High-Pressure Research
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Donald Weidner |
- The NSF Science and Technology Center for High Pressure Research (CHiPR), with its unparalleled staff and facilities, is uniquely positioned to support and advance the burgeoning new field of high pressure science. CHiPR, a collaboration among the Mineral Physics Institute of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and UC Davis, received funding in February 1991 as one of the second set of NSF Science and Technology Centers. We are now in the seventh year of the 11 year lifetime of a Science and Technology Center.
- CHiPR's scientific, technological, and educational goals are guided by two central scientific themes: (1) to understand the deep interiors of planets, especially the Earth's mantle and core, through quantitative study of the materials likely to be present in such environments, and (2) to use pressure as a probe of the structure, bonding, energetics, and physical properties of solids to improve fundamental understanding of high-pressure chemical and physical phenomena.
- We seek to advance high-pressure technology in both diamond-anvil cell and multi-anvil high-pressure, high-temperature environments, to use and improve the application of synchrotron radiation to high-pressure studies, and to develop in situ and ex situ characterization methods compatible with microscopic high-pressure samples.
- Perhaps the most important products of CHiPR are the people who come to the Center as students or post docs, become captured by the excitement of frontier research, contribute to the atmosphere within the Center, and then move on to positions in academia, industry or government labs. We already see the impact of CHiPR alumni at high pressure institutions around the world. Kurt Leinenweber is director of labs at the Arizona State high pressure facility, Yusheng Zhao recently joined the high pressure program at LANSCE in Los Alamos, Martin Kunz and Michael Hanfland are on the high pressure beam line staff at ESRF, Tom Duffy has begun as beamline designer and scientist for diamond anvil studies at APS and Yanbin Wang has taken a similar position for multi-anvil high pressure studies. Sho Utsumi is in charge of the installation of the large volume high pressure system at SPRING-8 in Japan. Our annual CHiPR meeting in June, 1995 brought together 65 high pressure scientists that are currently affiliated with CHiPR. Most of these scientists will soon move on to other institutions, bringing with them the tools honed at CHiPR.
- We are committed to a strong educational component for a community diverse in its needs and demographics. We train students and visitors in state-of-the-art high-pressure concepts and techniques, we provide continuity and flexibility for external and internal collaborations in our unique laboratories, and we engage in outreach programs to a varied community in academia, federal laboratories, industry, and the general public.
- In the recent post-cold-war era, the scientific community is grappling with the need for relevancy. Scientists must share their products with new communities. Centers have a responsibility to explore non-traditional methods and reach out to these communities. Technology transfer with industry is a critical area that CHiPR continues to cultivate. We find that the scientist to scientist interaction continues to be the most successful mode of interaction.
- K-12 education is a national priority. Basic research scientists have not traditionally entered into this area of education, in part, because we did not recognize that we had much to offer. However, we can bring new knowledge and technology, the excitement of discovery, the ability to both formulate and answer critical questions. CHiPR is committed to pursue interaction with the educational process. We have the opportunity to help redefine the style of interaction. We must continue to try new ideas and approaches, and critically assess the outcome. We must define the unique characteristics that we, as research scientists, can bring to the educational process.
Some of the major recent achievements in high-pressure research and mineral physics by the institutions involved in the Center are summarized below. These advancements should be measured not only in terms of a list of our own publications, but also in the extraordinary impact that the events leading up to the establishment of the Center itself have had on research efforts in dozens of laboratories around the world.