This grant provides partial support for upgrading the Impulsive Stimulated Scattering (ISS) Laboratory at the University of Washington. The ISS Laboratory has been in nearly continuous operation for over eight years. In part, upgrade work is needed because critical components (lasers, mirrors, optical devices and mounts, electronics, and computer systems) are nearing reasonable life expectancies. More importantly however, new technology, now availale, will extend the capabilities of the laboratory to higher temperatures, and to the study of more difficult and substantially smaller samples. Accurately characterized physical properties of minerals and fluids are prerequisite for any effort to understand processes within Earth. Impulsive Stimulated Scattering offers a versatile approach to the measurement in a single experiment of the elastic moduli, the equation of state, the thermal diffusivity, the viscosity, and the dynamics of molecular reorientation in fluids and in very small crystals. ISS has proven to be well adapted both to observations at very high temperatures and to the requirements of the diamond-anvil cell and to those of more conventional high-pressure systems. The ISS lab is operated and utilized by an interdisciplinary (Mineral Physics) group including, Michael Brown (Geophysics), Leon Slutsky (Chemistry), and Evan Abeamson (Chemistry) with collaborations in the Geological Sciences (Mark Ghiorso) and Physics (Robert Ingalls) Departments. Undergraduate and graduate students from Geophysics, Geological Sciences, Chemistry, and Physics also participated in research in the ISS lab. ***
