Capital-DOE Alliance Center: A Center of Excellence for High Pressure Science and Technology

Extreme pressure, temperature, radiation, field strength etc. are not only conditions under which the performance of certain materials is crucial, but conditions that may also be harnessed to explore new phase space and experimental design. At Northwestern University, CDAC Partner Steve Jacobsen’s interdisciplinary team works along interfaces between chemistry, materials science, and geophysics, conducting research and graduate training in the area of properties of materials under extreme conditions. Experimental and theoretical projects focus on elastic properties of single crystals, glasses, superhard materials, nano-crystalline materials, and molecular crystals. Previous graduate students have gone on to research positions at Sandia in high energy density physics and hold current internships at LANL in shock and detonation physics. Research at CDAC partner institution Northwestern centers on two goals: (1) develop and perform highly-accurate measurements of elastic tensors including anisotropy of solids at high pressures and temperatures, and (2) harness high P-T for phase space exploration, guided by high-throughput phase prediction algorithms. Unique instrumentation in GHz-ultrasound, combined with high P-T spectroscopy and synchrotron radiation techniques provide students broad training and skills for NNSA science goals.