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Current activities and achievements in our research group in mineralogy and crystallography include:

Yang Ding has begun a research project to examine mixing processes that occur between terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials during impacts. Now he is using (LA)CBED and EDS to identify the minerals devitrified from an impactite from Henbury, Australia.

Stefanie Japel is studying stacking disorders in a layered pyribole structure.

Dori Farthing is investigating the mechanisms of weathering in toxic metal-bearing slags (namely lead slag, copper slag and U and Th-rich tin slag). This work involves identifying slag mineralogy through use of traditional light microscopy, TEM, electron microprobe studies and x-ray spectroscopy. Ancient slags are also being examined to see how specific phases (both glass and crystalline) change over time.

Kevin Moore is studying kinetics and phase transformations of minerals and metal alloys as well as characterization and optimization of energy filtered transmission electron microscope imaging. A list of his publications appears here.

Thanks to grants of $680,000 from the Academic Research Infrastructure Program of the National Science Foundation and $760,000 from the William M. Keck Foundation, we have recently installed a new transmission electron microscope. Although our current instrument has served us well, resulting in approximately 500 publications, it was installed in April, 1983, and is no longer a cutting-edge research microscope. The new instrument, which became operational in January, 1999, is a 300-kV, field-emission gun electron microscope (a Philips CM300FEG). This microscope substantially improves our resolutions for both imaging and diffraction. In addition, it has truly awesome analytical capabilities, being equipped not only for X-ray emission spectroscopy but also with an imaging filter for electron energy-loss spectroscopy and energy-filtered elemental imaging at the 1-nm scale. The new instrument has been installed in our old sample preparation lab in Olin Hall, which was extensively renovated to the tight specifications required by a modern state-of-the-art TEM. This spectacular addition to our lab will ensure not only that we remain competitive in research on mineralogy, geochemistry, and petrology, but also that we will be able to continue educating the very best graduate students in these fields.

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