This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The award will provide funds for infrastructure renovations needed to house new analytical and computational instrumentation for interdisciplinary research in the Earth and space sciences. The new infrastructure will enable Carnegie Institution researchers, together with a large community of visiting scientists, to pursue more effectively a broad sweep of fundamental research addressing the origin and evolution of stellar and planetary systems, the geochemical cycles of planetary volatiles, the evolution and dynamics of the Earth?s interior and surface, Earth?s energy resources, the origins of life, and the coevolution of the geo- and biospheres. The new infrastructure will support analytical micro- and nanocharacterization and imaging laboratories, together with associated sample preparation facilities, including a focused ion beam workstation, a transmission electron microscope, X-ray nanoscopes, an ultramicrotome, an ion mill, optical microscopes, and micromanipulators. Our objective is to collocate novel new instruments with existing instruments (that are currently in deficient lab facilities) into a unique cross-disciplinary research laboratory targeted for advances in planetary and solid-Earth science, astrobiology, studies of deep carbon reservoirs on Earth, and materials science problems related to energy. Renovation of an existing computational laboratory is needed to accommodate large clusters of multi-core processors, critical for future theoretical research in astrophysics, computational seismology, geodynamics, and molecular dynamics. This renovation will mesh with a campus-wide installation of a much faster (up to 10 Gb/s) internal network to support the growing data bandwidth needs of laboratory and theoretical research. Space targeted for renovation meets strict electromagnetic field and vibration requirements to house even the most sensitive state-of-the-art microanalytical instrumentation, but lacks adequate temperature control and power. Together with institutional contributions, NSF support will revitalize this otherwise outmoded space, with updated environmental controls that will allow full-time operation, additional electrical power, and instrument-specific utilities.
The renovated facility will serve as a unique research center for the broad scientific community. The new infrastructure will allow the installation of new and existing analytical instruments that will enable precise and sensitive characterization of a broad range of Earth, space, and technological materials. It will be a user-friendly facility that will be frequented annually by more than 100 scientists, including Carnegie staff, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scientists, graduate students, and high school and undergraduate interns. Benefits of the new facility will also extend to the international mineral physics and high-pressure communities through the NSF COMPRES consortium and two DOE centers headquartered on the Carnegie Institution campus and serving 24 partner universities across the country, and to researchers and students from other institutions in the region. The new facility will also directly benefit the Deep Carbon Observatory, a Carnegie-based consortium sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, planned to involve 400 investigators at 80 institutions in 24 countries. The upgraded facility will have significant impact on the research programs in many fields, including geochemistry, experimental petrology and geophysics, cosmochemistry, high-pressure physics and mineral physics, diamond technology, geobiology, molecular evolution, extrasolar planets, and astrobiology, thereby promoting interdisciplinary science and collaborations, and providing unique new educational opportunities for students from high school to postdoctoral levels.
This project involves major renovations to laboratory spaces at the Carnegie Instittution for Science in Washington DC that house three groups of instruments, the combination of which forms a coherent and multidisciplinary facility for research in Earth and space science and materials physics. The three segments of the renovated facility will be devoted to (1) electron and ion beam instrumentation and associated sample preparation (the "EM Suite"), (2) spectroscopic imaging and analysis, and (3) computational infrastructure. All three of these segments are now complete. Though the entirety of the funding for this project was in renovation, we have been able already to produce new science from the facilities. Several examples are given here: A focused ion beam scanning electron microscope in the EM Suite has allowed investigator Fei to produce diamond anvil cells that reach pressures up to 200 GPa, equivalent to near the Earth'c core-mantle boundary. Experiments conducted in these new cells are determining the material properties of metal at core conditions. Study of noble gases by investigator Goncharov in the spectroscopy laboratory show that Saturn's and Jupiter's cores must have different compositions, which explain the differences in core size and luminosity between the planets. The computational facility has allowed investigator Boss to determine that the most likely trigger for the initial formation of our solar system was a Type II supernova shockwave.
