This week, Luisa, Heidi, and I traveled to the University of Michigan to use the EPMA. We collected compositional data on numerous samples while trying out some new restaurants in the area.

From June 17th-23rd, I was fortunate to attend the GRC conference at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, MA. Michigan State University had a strong presence at the meeting with five graduate students presenting topics on seismology, geodynamics, and mineral physics. My presentation highlighted some of our initial findings on the Mn-perovskite solid solution. The title was “Stability of Mn-rich perovskites at high pressures and temperatures; implications for hot regions of the mantle.”

On May 9th, 2023, we traveled to ALS to collect deformation data on Fe-N and Fe-C alloys. These materials are proposed to be stable in Earth’s core, and information on their strength is needed to understand inner core anisotropy. In the past, we have used B and Be gaskets to study how the low-pressure Fe-N’s deform. The cBN gasket enables us to achieve high pressures without significant damage to the diamonds and poses a lower health risk than Be.

On May 3rd-May 5th, Jiaxin Zhang, Meichen Liu, Yurong Zhang, and I convened an oral and poster session at the 57th North-Central GSA meeting. Our session was T31 “The Origin of Compositional and Thermal Heterogeneity within Earth’s Interior.” You can view details from the session here.
Convening a session was a great experience and I can’t wait to do it again!

March 19th, 2023 was our final group beamtime to HPCAT-IDB before the APS upgrade. While at HPCAT, Luisa Chavarria, Dr. Susannah (Suki) Dorfman, Dr. Maddury (Zulu) Somayazulu, and I collected valuable data on solid solutions that occur in the lower mantle! We anticipate continuing these experiments at the Advanced Light Source and APS after the shutdown. During the APS shutdown, they will replace the electron storage ring, increasing the brightness by 500 times! Additional information can be found here.