HPCAT

at the Advanced Photon Source

Recent HPCAT Science Highlights

The ability to understand and predict the response of matter at extreme conditions requires knowledge of a material’s equation-of-state, including the location of phase boundaries, transition kinetics, and the evolution of material strength.  Cerium is a material with a complex phase diagram that continues to attract significant scientific interest.  A recent publication, Dynamic experiments to study the α−ϵ phase transition in cerium (B. J. Jensen and F. J. Cherne from LANL and N. Velisavljevic, HPCAT/LLNL) J. Appl. Phys. 127, 095901… more

A recent article in Science Advances has been selected as one of the Advanced Photon Source's science highlights.  The team of researchers, led by Tim Strobel and Li Zhu of Carnegie Institution for Science, used advanced structure searching tools to predict the first thermodynamically stable carbon-based clathrate and then synthesized the clathrate… more

HPCAT Group Leader, Maddury Somayazulu, was recently featured in the October 2019 issue of Scientific American.  The article highlights some of Dr. Somayazulu’s scientific work, and in particular his effort in using high pressure and synchrotron x-ray techniques toward understanding and discovery of room-temperature superconductors.  Dr. Somayazulu, along with HPCAT partner Professor Rus Hemley (University of Illinois at Chicago) and collaborators from Geophysical… more

HPCAT facilities, located at the Advanced Photon Source, were used in a recent research work in order to study a unique material system – pseudomorphic body center cubic (bcc) magnesium. The team, led by Mr. Manish Jain, a Ph.D. student from the University of Nevada, Reno, utilized bi-phase interface strain engineering to transform Mg… more

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Argonne National Laboratory, and University of Chicago have found a subtle phase transition in 1,3,5-Triamino-2,4,6- trinitrobenzene (TATB).  TATB is an important compound in the energetic materials community as it is a highly stable, insensitive explosive.  A more complete understanding of this and other energetic materials is crucial for practical use as well as the development of theoretical models.  Extensive single-crystal diffraction experiments were carried out at HPCAT—located at… more

Congratulations to Professor Yogesh K. Vohra, long time HPCAT user and NNSA-SSAA partner, and team for recognition of their work in part performed at HPCAT.  Their article, authored by Samuel L. Moore, Gopi K. Samudrala, Shane A. Catledge, and Yogesh K. Vohra, "… more

The satellite of the 4d3/2 – 2p1/2 emission line (Lγ) has been traditionally interpreted as a signature of the bare (unscreened) magnetic moment of the 4f electrons in the lanthanides [see e.g. B. Maddox et al., PRL 96, 215701 (2006)]. Here, a collaboration of theorists from the University of California at Davis and Stanford along with experimenters from the University of Washington and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory find that the intensity of the satellite structure of the early light… more

Research led by PhD student Christian Childs from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, into the transformation of La2Sn2O7 through different extreme conditions pathways has been investigated via the laser-heated diamond anvil cell, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and computational methods. Natural specimens of the pyrochlore (A2more