 Bingo, we're back. We're back with research in Manoa. We are so excited to do this show. The show comes to us from the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, which is part of SOWEST, the School of Ocean, Earth, and Science. Ocean, Earth, Ocean and Earth, Science, and Technology at UH Manoa. And we're so happy today to have Chris Deira, and I can't pronounce his actual born name. It's Shemislav, but known as Chris Deira. He's a researcher at HIGP in the School of Ocean, Earth, Science, and Technology. And we have Hannah Shelton. She's an undergraduate alumnus of the University of Hawaii and currently a third year PhD student in mineral physics. And I guess that means material science. Yes. Yeah. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. So tell us what you guys do, because they need to know what you do at UH Manoa in your laboratory. We are a group that specializes in high pressure and high temperature experiments. What we do has applications to earth science, material science, chemistry, physics. So it's multidisciplinary. We basically try to learn about how matter behaves when it's taken to extremes, extreme cold, extreme hot, extreme compression, bottoms of the ocean, centers of the planets. We look at how new substances can be formed that you don't find normally on the earth, how they can be used for their unique properties. What happens with rocks when you squeeze them particularly hard? Yeah. Oh, that's just a short description of much more. Can you show the atomic structure that you have down on the floor? So people get an idea of what we're talking about. What is that now? This is a model of enstatite, a silicate crystal that is present in a lot of rocks that build up the earth mantle. And it's one of the objects of our investigation. What we do in the lab is we take a real crystal, not this model. We squeeze it to very high pressures and temperatures. And we try to use methods based on mostly on scattering of x-rays to see what happens with these individual atoms and bonds, whether they do something interesting, whether the properties change, conductivity, color, density. And we try to put this in a context of what it means for the earth, whether that means some rocks sinking in lava or floating or earthquakes forming. But it could mean much more than that. Let me just articulate some of the stuff I learned from you before the show began. Number one is you can look at existing organic and inorganic atoms and compounds. Two is you can test them and put them under those stress situations and see what their characteristics are. Not only naturally, but when you stress them. And three is you can build them. If you like what you see, if you like the properties and characteristics or the way they react, this is almost like GMO. You can change the way the physical world works. This is really amazing. So in the process of learning about these atoms, these atomic structures, you can find new things that we never had before and find new things that will do new functionality in our world. You can make Bill Gates look like a piker. We'll talk about that right after this movie because we have a movie which will explain at least some of what you do. Let's run the movie. Munch, what am I favorite? That's a fabulous painting he did. It's wonderful. I portray so much. I get the sense of it that we're here in Hawaii, 2,500 miles from anything, and yet you're at the front here. This is global science. Yes. I think it's pretty progressive, but it requires some instrumentation. What we do is basically lab-based science. So we use devices. We need instruments to make observations. So the two solutions we have for this right now is one is long-range traveling. So we go to Chicago to this beautiful facility. You could see in the movie Argon National Lab, and we have our own instrument over there that we can use. Our students can use for their research. You've been there? I have, many times. I cannot do that. It's actually quite difficult at first in graduate school because there's a lot of classes they have to take. There's lab work they have to do on campus, and there's travel which means working overnight and so on. I think Hannah can share some of her experiences. But first, tell me what kind of equipment you have in your laboratory here. What's it like? How are you outfitted? And where can I get this? This has got to be very extraordinary equipment. So I started at the University of Hawaii about three years ago. When we started, we didn't really have much in the lab other than microscopes. So you could make quantitative visual observations, but you couldn't really measure something exactly. But with time, we kind of built it up and we just outfitted a brand new lab with a big grant we received from National Science Foundation. So we have some video footage of this lab. This is the lab that Hannah and other students use in their research. We use it to teach students in undergraduate classes about methods for characterizing minerals that they receive. I'm going to look at that one now. Sure. Okay, let me have the second movie to show you the equipment, and we'll describe it as we go through the movie. So the lab is called an X-ray Atlas Lab. Atlas refers to something that is able to hold very big weight and X-ray means that that's the method that we use. We have twin instruments. This is a pretty unique system. One of these instruments is for measuring powdered samples. The other one is for measuring single crystal small pieces of rocks. It's a lab that was just recently renovated. We use optical microscopes to mount the samples. We have a video observation system on the instrument which allows to align it with the X-ray beam. This is one of the newest instruments in the world. The company that makes this instrument, Brooker, is based in Wisconsin, just came up with some very significant upgrades of components. So I think this was the first one with this particular configuration they sold worldwide. So you can see on the left side a small crumb of a crystal about human hair size. On the right side you can see a scattering pattern of X-rays that shines towards the detector. This is another graduate student grinding a rock sample for analysis. So if you find a piece of rock in the field, you can bring it to our lab, grind it like this, and the instrument will tell you what kind of minerals are present in what proportions. And you can also use it for this materials research, like what we talk about looking for super hard materials or looking for transformations materials undergo under pressure and temperature. So this is a great educational resource. We have a lot of students interested in using it either for thesis research or just for part of their class lab sections, but it's also a very advanced research instrument. So it gives us an edge in being able to do experiments. Other people cannot do in their labs because they lack this kind of infrastructure. So this is now he's doing, this is done with light? What is this exact machine doing? X-ray light. So there's a source that emits X-rays, like the ones that are used in dental analysis. X-rays are shined on the sample and the sample scatters them depending on the nature of the sample. You analyze the interference pattern, the pattern that the sample emits, and from this you can calculate a model where the atoms are and how they are connected. Okay. Before we go to our break, I do want to hear from Hannah about how she got involved in this and what she's doing and whether it's a career. So I started out at the UH Manoa and the chemistry department, and originally I did not expect to end up in the geology and geophysics department at all. What happened was, at least for me, is I got kind of a typical undergraduate lab job within SOEST for a couple different labs, and I was just immensely impressed by the type of work they were doing, the people there are amazing. And when I was ready to graduate, I was highly encouraged to buy one of my bosses at the time to apply. And when I applied- That means a lot when that happens. Yes. Yeah. So I gave it a shot and then Jamek was able, you saw my application, was, you know, I guess appreciated my chemistry background, I would hope, and then I was able to come on. And part of the big selling point was the collaborative aspect that we have with the advanced photon source in Chicago. That's something that even in your average graduate career, having access to national lab facilities is, it's a very special thing. It's very, very, it's a high privilege indeed. Yeah. So you're on your way to a PhD here? Yes. What's your PhD subject? So as part of the high pressure mineral physics group, I do this kind of work that we've been talking about. It's this kind of this intersection between geology and material science at these extreme conditions. Now over, in terms of what the piece of paper will say, it will be part of the geology and geophysics department. But at the graduate level, particularly within SOEST, it's maybe 50-50 between people who have a traditional geology background and those coming from outside disciplines like chemistry, like physics, mathematics, stuff like that. Wow, it all comes together, doesn't it? Yes. Okay. And let's see, we have a couple of minutes to describe what's on the table. So Chris, maybe you go, Hannah, whoever's running this equipment, tell me what's on the table. So what I have in front of me is a mock-up of one of the experimental techniques that we use, and this is called a diamond anvil cell. And in essence, what we're doing with this cell is that we have two halves, and in the middle is a diamond. These are not real diamonds. This is all plastic. This is the one you gave me so I could take it home to my wife. This is not a real diamond. Unfortunately, it is not. We wish it was to, but... Disappointed. But what happens is that in actuality, we take these gem quality diamonds and the tip of the diamond, the kind that would sit kind of at the base of the ring if you had one, we shave it off to make a flat surface that we call a culet. And what we do then is that under the microscope, we put our sample, usually a single crystal of something that we want to look at, on the tip of the diamond and then close the cell kind of like a sandwich. So we have the diamonds compressing. And there's diamonds that are the hardest substance in the world. Yes. So why we use diamonds is that, one, it's for the hardness. They're not the only anvils that exist. There are other materials, but they're very, very desirable because of their hardness, but also because they're transparent. So if we wanted to look down in the microscope through our anvil... At the moment of compression. Yes. And see the physical process of compression. Yes. So we have a visual feed continually while we're doing our experiment. And that goes back to sometimes when we compress our materials, we see color changes, we see physical phenomena that's just apparent to the naked eye. So you're recording this? Yes. Oh, wow, that's pretty exciting. I like that footage too. I think you caught the essence of advantage of this technique very well. So you said that this is why this is happening. We call this in situ, as opposed to X-situ, which is you cook and then look what happened. Yeah, yeah. So one of the first fields where high pressure technologies were industrially explored was synthesis of diamond for abrasives applications for jewelry applications and so on. This was done in the 1950s by General Electric. And the only method that they had to do it at that time was the cook and look method. So they used large hydraulic presses that could compress large quantities of samples, but you couldn't see what is happening with the sample while you are doing it, and an experiment would take a day or longer. So it's a very slow process. With a device like this, because you can see us, the process is happening, it's much faster and gives you an answer right away. Yeah. Well, I'll give you a break right away. Wonderful. Aloha, I'm Carl Campania, host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. I hope you join us over the next several weeks as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii and explore the alternative fuels supply chain necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability. Join us as we have good conversations with our farmers, our producers, our conversion technologies, our investors, and our legislators as we try to achieve our transportation sustainability goals. See you soon. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts six live talk shows from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday, and then streams earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Bingo, we're back. We're back with Chris Dara and Hannah Shelton, and they both work in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology with Material Science and very interesting work they do, and this is a mock-up of an actual compression press. How big is it compressed, the real one? So the real one is actually much smaller, and I have it in my hands right here. You can kind of see for scale the mock-up, the black mock-up is, gosh, that would be six or seven times the scale. So all of the work that we do in this one, you might be able to see the diamonds shining, is all under the microscope, so this can't really be done with the naked eye. So the microscope is going to look through the aperture, through the diamond that you're using to compress, and how do you get those things to compress? You have to have another device. So the really good thing about the diamond anvil cell is that functionally it's a very simple device. So once we put the two halves of our cell together, we're able just to compress it together with screws that act as a vice. So there'll be screw holes that feed between the two halves of the cell, and because, in essence, force is just, excuse me, it's just exerted over a certain amount of area, the smaller amount of... There's a formula, isn't there? There it is, yeah. Excuse me, sorry, bug in my throat. When we apply a lot of force, pressure is just force over an area. There we go. When we apply a lot of force over a very tiny amount of area, we can get a lot of pressure. So we exert pressures... So it doesn't need a big, filler room gizmo to do with your hands. We do it with our hands, just with a pair of hex wrenches basically. So like we were talking about earlier with general electrics, forays into doing this high pressure machine, high pressure synthesis, high pressure science, they needed very large volume presses, these hydraulic presses, and they still exist, but this allows us to... There's a lot more efficient... This is more efficient. Sometimes we have samples that are hard to get, so you can't get a lot of them, and that lends itself well to this as well, yeah. So if I turn the hex net on it, the several of them, I'm going to turn it over. So are you measuring exactly how much you're turning it? Is it calibrated? So you're turning it a little bit, and you watch then through the diamond to see how much that little bit of compression is going to change things? So there's several ways that we can do this, kind of the old-fashioned way is just doing this by hand and then checking periodically what the pressure is. Typically we have a calibrant inside the cell with our sample, and that when we look at the calibrant... What was the calibrant? So oftentimes we use a piece of ruby, so a piece of corundum, but there's other ones we can use as well, but for us the way ruby behaves with pressure is very reliable. It's been studied extensively. So what property of ruby do we use to measure pressure? So in this case it's the fluorescence of the ruby, so we shine a green laser on it, and the spectra that it gives back to us when we look at it. Depending on how that spectra shifts we can tell exactly what pressure is within the cell, and this works especially well at very, very high pressures that we're looking at. Interesting, the pressure translates to change in color, that's quite amazing, of light. Yes. So okay, so this is central in your research, this whole process with the diamond and the press and the compression to see what happens. What kinds of things do you learn as you turn the screws? The title of this show is Modern Alchemy from Hades to Heaven with Mineral Physics, but we should have said something about turning the screws on modern alchemy. Yeah, I didn't think about that, but it's a good angle. So the reference I was trying to use in the title was basically supposed to reflect the multidisciplinary applications of what we do. So Hades is a representation of something down below, so the earth interior in this case. Hades is supposed to be very hot, so what we often do is we heat our samples while they are squeezed. Heat and pressure help to carry forward the chemical processes, so if you are after making a new material, an example here is trying to make materials harder or done diamond or similarly hard to diamond but much less expensive. So by combining pressure and temperature you have a good way of making new chemicals, chemicals that you wouldn't be able to make otherwise in wet chemistry. And heaven was the reference to simulating extraterrestrial environments just as easily as we can simulate the environment that earth rocks experience in the earth interior. We can simulate what happens during meteorite impact or at the centers of other planets that can be built from different chemicals. Starting to get the idea. So a lot of chemicals, minerals anyway, down in the center of the earth, you know, have been cooking in some way or under pressure in some way for millennia. And you are able to do that. You're able to simulate that with your press and I guess with other gear. So now you can create a similar process and see what you can make. You can actually, like earth made some of these materials, you can make these materials and you can make different kinds of materials that are different than the materials that earth made. Isn't that scary? First I think it would be more exciting. Fascinating. I've always been very taken by the fact that nature has figured out its own way of making most of the things that we care about, like diamonds. Diamonds are made in earth naturally. It takes us this big intellectual effort to figure out how to replicate this, but earth has its own cooking recipe for making diamonds. It's kind of the same with a lot of technologically relevant materials. If you take apart your cell phone, one of the very important parts of your cell phone is going to be made from ferroelectric material. So an example of a family of widely used ferroelectric materials are materials with structures similar to a mineral called perovskite. So perovskite is very widely present. Is that something on the periodic table? It's a compound. It's a silicate mineral. So earth found its own ways at certain depths to make a lot of perovskite. Chemists kind of reproduced this recipe but used different elements to enhance some properties, like for example the properties that are important for frequencies that you use in the cell phone. So theoretically then, this is a way out. Just tell me, you could create a new kind of perovskite. You could make a better, if you like the characteristics of perovskite, you can make a better one and you could have better characteristics for cell phones or who knows what kind of electronics. We're into this now. This is something that can happen. Absolutely. And this actually is happening weekly. This field is growing quite rapidly because looking at varied pressure conditions, it's kind of like opening a new dimension. And if you're just stuck with temperature and changing your chemicals, you're more limited. If you have one more dimension to explore, one more parameter to add to this, your cooking recipes become richer. You can have more variety. And the variations are not only by choosing elements, but also by changing the nature of components. So if we talk about these perovskite materials, there's a lot of functional perovskite that are made with atoms other than the ones that are found in the earth. But we are now into making hybrid organic, inorganic perovskites. I know organic and I know inorganic, but I know that it was hybrid. Sure. So one of my favorite movies is Star Trek Voyager. The Starship Voyager had... You heard it here on ThinkDeck. The Starship Voyager had an energy source which was basically biologically derived, the neural cells or something like this. It was integrated into ship based on electronics and physics. So it's kind of the same with materials. You can take atomic arrangement like this one, make some holes in it that are large enough to fit organic molecules, and then you get a hybrid material. It doesn't mean that it's alive. It means that it's made of molecules like your body and hard atoms like rocks. But this hybrid nature can give it special properties. So it doesn't mean it's alive. We're not tampering with biology here. It just happens to be a biological molecules, that's all. Sure. So interesting. My god, mind blowing actually. And with this, who knows what can happen. It's never found in nature. So you're creating a whole new marriage of the materials around us on earth. That is amazing. So what are you working on right now? So Hannah's project is kind of along these lines. Why don't you tell about your project? So in general, my project has to do with how a lot of these minerals, these rock forming minerals behave when we introduce water into them. And more specifically, what does the bonding, what is the hydrogen bonding introduced by that water? What does it do at the conditions within the interior of the earth? So we have a couple of transparencies. Could we show what Hannah is talking about? Oh, we don't have them. But fairly recently, there was a discovery showing that actually in a diamond inclusion brought up one of these deep earth minerals and it was found to have a lot of water contained within it. Now this was kind of a surprise for a long time. People assumed that the interior of the earth was more or less dry. There was some water brought down when slabs subduct, when plate tectonics occurs, but people didn't have a very good grasp on how much water was sitting underneath us. And based upon this extracted mineral that had a lot of water bound up within it, some people estimate that there's, you know, multitudes of oceans worth of water sitting below us in the mantle. Even in hot temperature? In the hot temperature, bound up within these minerals. I see, I see. So you can, you can have water, but it's not a liquid form. It's not a liquid form. It's bound up and therefore the fact that everything is so hot around it, that's not going to make it boil off or anything. Yeah, so in these instances, it's chemically bound up within the minerals that we're looking at. And so a lot of our research goes into trying to experimentally recreate the conditions like we were talking about of the interior of the earth. And that allows us to get kind of a best case scenario environment for us to study the properties of these minerals. And this lets us go back and communicate with other geoscientists, like seismologists, like volcanologists, and lets us communicate with what they see. So they come to us saying, we saw this sort of seismic occurrence, or we got this mineral out of a lava flow, and it looks interesting, you know, what are the environments deep below the earth where we can't really look that would have created this situation? So that's a lot of what we do. It's fascinating. Have you published? Are you going to publish? I have published, yeah. In this line of research? Yes. That's fabulous. So we're out of time, but Chris, can you, can you face that camera over there and tell the people why they should care about what you're doing? How this is going to affect their lives, change their lives altogether in this planet? I think it will, but you tell them. I think to some extent our society has already explored what we had available, the classical ways of supplying energy and fueling our cars and so on. So I think for the long-term future we really have to look at novel ways of solving these problems. And material science is one of the sciences that can provide these answers. And I think what we do, the extreme condition science is one of the angles we can take at it. It's a method that provides ways to synthesize novel materials with unique properties that can harvest light for us or store hydrogen or tell us how water behaves in the deep earth mantle. Yeah, unbelievable. And he didn't say this, but I will. It's only beginning. Yeah, of course. Okay, that's Chris Dira, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology, and graduate student Hannah Shelton, who is an undergraduate alumnus of UH and currently in her third year PhD program in mineral physics. What an exciting discussion. Thank you so much. Hannah and Chris, thank you very much. Wonderful to talk to you.