Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Minerals are the fundamental materials of the Earth, and if we wish to understand the processes which formed the Earth, and which continue to modify its landscape and the human environment, we need to understand the behaviour of minerals under the full spectrum of conditions experienced on Earth. This proposal focuses on a wide variety of minerals in an attempt to understand their constitution and behaviour at the atomic scale, and use this understanding to rationalize and predict their behaviour at the macroscopic scale (the scale of direct human perception). I use various forms of radiation (X-rays, neutrons) to 'see' into a mineral at the atomic scale, and to derive the arrangement of atoms from which it is built. Details concerning the disorderly behaviour of atoms can be discerned with other forms of radiation (infrared, gamma rays). The resulting pictures of the minerals allow us to understand aspects of how these minerals formed, and at what conditions (e.g., high or low temperature). There are approximately 4200 minerals, and we now have sufficient information available to try to understand the constitution and behaviour of minerals from a global perspective, and address such general questions as: What arrangements of atoms occur in minerals? What factors affect the existence of these arrangements? What factors control the chemical compositions of minerals? How can we predict the physical and chemical properties of minerals under a wide variety of conditions? The work proposed here addresses several of these problems from a fundamental perspective, and will further our understanding of different Earth materials and the way that they respond to changes in their environment.This proposal involves extensive training of Highly Qualified Personnel in the form of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and collaborative work with visiting scientists from other Universities and Government Institutions. In particular, the collaborative work proposed will give students an unusually wide and diverse background in scientific instrumentation, preparing them to develop the laboratories of the future.