Student Life
During the semester, we hold two seminars each week. These seminars are designed not only to deepen students’ understanding of research topics, but also to strengthen presentation and discussion skills.
- Paper-reading seminar
Undergraduate students read a geoscience textbook in a tutorial style during the first semester in order to build a solid foundation. In the second semester, each student reads papers related to his or her own research topic and presents them to the group.
Graduate students introduce and discuss papers directly related to their research topics. - Research seminar
Each student presents previous work relevant to the project and reports on current research progress.
Research themes are chosen according to each student’s interests. Many experiments are carried out in Room 6304 of Building 6 on the Ikuta Campus. Depending on the project, students may also use shared facilities on campus or conduct experiments at other universities, research institutes, or industrial laboratories.
At our Ikuta-campus laboratory, students can perform high-pressure experiments using a diamond-anvil cell. A sample is compressed between diamonds—the hardest known material—and then heated with infrared lasers or electric heaters to reproduce the high-pressure and high-temperature conditions corresponding to the deep Earth. Some projects require patience and careful preparation, but the sense of achievement is equally great when the experiments succeed.
Left: diamond-anvil cell / Right: experiment at SPring-8
Examples of Research Topics
- Constraining the interior structures of Earth and planets from material properties measured at high pressure
- Thermodynamically stable phase relations of minerals and iron alloys at high pressure and high temperature
- Understanding Earth’s evolutionary processes through element partitioning under high pressure
- Determination of crystal structures at high pressure and temperature by X-ray diffraction and spectroscopy
- Redox reactions and global cycles of volatile elements in Earth’s interior
- Reproduction of small-body impacts using pulsed-heating experiments in diamond-anvil cells
- Development of internally resistive-heated DAC techniques for generating ultrahigh temperatures
- Development of millisecond-scale spectroscopic thermometry for determining melting relations at high pressure