UMET - High Pressure On Large Scale Facilities

Aerial view of the SOLEIL synchrotron. C. Kermarrec - SOLEIL — Synchrotron SOLEIL, GFDL, Wikipedia.

 

Large scale research facilities are national or international centers dedicaed to experiments that would not be viable in smaller laboratories. For high pressure reseach, light sources such as synchrotrons are particularly useful as they provide intense and well-focused radiation that can be used for in-situ measurements, while the sample is under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature.

In our work, we mostly use the following sources:

• the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble 
• PETRA-III in Hamburg 
• the Advanced Photon Source in the United States 
• SOLEIL near Paris.

Multi-anvil press experiment on the ID06 beamline at ESRF.

Diamond anvil cell experiment on the ID27 beamline at ESRF.

A resistively-heated diamond anvil cell on the P02.2 beamline at PETRA III.

Laser heating system on the P02.2 beamline at PETRA III.

Diamond anvil cells, Paris-Edinburgh, and multi-anvil presses are often installed on dedicated beamlines with the matching measurement, heating, and positioning systems. Those beamlines also provide environements allowing the users to prepare their sample prior to the experiment.

Deformation measurements on a synchrotron. Radiography and diffraction are used to quantify deformation, stress, and sample texture.

 

Multigrains diffraction in a diamond anvil cell. In-situ and grain by grain tracking of the evolution of a sample's microstructure.

 

In our case, we mostly use large scale facilities beamlines producing x-rays with which we perform diffraction, radiography, and tomography. We study the physical properties of our samples, their crystallographic structures, microstructure, or plastic properties.

Sample contributions

• In a deformation experiment, the macroscopic deformation applied to the samples is measured using x-ray radiography. The applied stress is estimated using x-ray diffraction by quantifying the measured microscopic elastic strains. The sample texture is evaluated based on variations of diffraction intensities with orientation.
  • F. Lin, N. Hilairet, P. Raterron, A. Addad, J. Immoor, H. Marquardt, C. N. Tomé, L. Miyagi, S. Merkel, Elasto-viscoplastic self consistent modeling of the ambient temperature plastic behavior of periclase deformed up to 5.4 GPa, Journal of Applied Physics 122 205902 (2017) [doi: 10.1063/1.4999951]
  • C. Bollinger, P. Raterron, O. Castelnau, F. Detrez, S. Merkel, Textures in deforming forsterite aggregates up to 8 GPa and 1673 K, Physics and Chemistry of Minerals 43 409-417 (2016) [doi: 10.1007/s00269-016-0805-x]
• Multigrain diffraction allows tracking individual grains inside a material undergoing dynamic processes such as deformation or phase transformation. One can follow the evolution of the sample microstructure, in-situ and grain by grain. This allows, for instance, decipher transformation mechanisms between minerals.
  • C. Langrand, N. Hilairet, C. Nisr, M. Roskosz, G. Ribárik, G. B. M. Vaughan, S. Merkel, Reliability of multigrain indexing for orthorhombic polycrystals above 1 Mbar: application to MgSiO₃ post-perovskite, Journal of Applied Crystallography 50 120-130 (2017) [doi: 10.1107/S1600576716018057]
  • A. D. Rosa, N. Hilairet, S. Ghosh, J. P. Perrillat, G. Garbarino, S. Merkel, Evolution of grain sizes and orientations during phase transitions in hydrous Mg₂SiO₄, Journal of Geophysical Research 121 (2016) [doi: 10.1002/2016JB013360]