Thermodynamics of melting, freezing, and glass formation at high pressure

Speaker:  Zachary Geballe, CIW

Program Description
Melting, freezing, and glass formation at high pressures cause dramatic changes inside the Earth and are key steps in the synthesis certain exotic materials. Experimental characterization of these order-disorder transformations remains a challenge at high pressures. I will present a new high-pressure dynamic heating and calorimetry techniques that open up many opportunities to study such transformations. Using these techniques, we have constrained the heat capacity and thermal conductivity across a variety of order-disorder transitions in high-pressure H2O, detected melting and freezing of platinum at high pressure, and synthesized superconducting palladium hydride with variable hydrogen content.