Peter Driscoll and Sally June Tracy at Carnegie’s Broad Branch Road campus, May 15, 2019. Photo: Roberto Molar Candanosa, Carnegie DTM.
The Peter Driscoll/Sally June Tracy project is an interdisciplinary opportunity for an early career materials physicist, Tracy, to work with an early career geodynamicist, Driscoll, and for a postdoc to gain expertise in both fields using novel high-pressure techniques that inform new models.
The explosion of extrasolar planet discoveries has raised new questions about the formation, evolution and the habitability of planets. The mantles of carbon-rich super-Earths, exoplanets up to about 10 Earth-masses, are thought to be rich in silicon carbide (SiC), while the cores are believed to be rich in iron/iron-carbide. However, there are obstacles in modeling the internal structure and thermal evolution of such planets because of poor constraints on material properties at the extreme pressure-temperature conditions of planetary interiors. The duo, with a postdoc, seeks to overcome this problem with new high-pressure experiments that will inform new models. Peter Driscoll and Sally June Tracy are shown in the lab.