Department of Physics, School of Science and Technology / Graduate School of Science and Technology, Meiji University: Earth and Planetary Interior Physics Laboratory (Sinmyo Laboratory)

During the semester, students participate in seminars twice a week. These seminars deepen students’ understanding of their research and also provide opportunities to practice presentation skills.

• Literature seminar
  Undergraduate students read an Earth science textbook in a round-table format during the spring semester to acquire fundamental knowledge. In the fall semester, each student reads papers related to their own research topic and introduces them to the group. Graduate students present papers related to their own research topics.
• Research seminar
  Each student presents previous studies related to their research topic and reports on their own research progress.

Students choose research topics according to their interests and conduct their work accordingly. Experiments are mainly carried out in Laboratory 6304 in Building 6 on the Ikuta Campus. Depending on the research topic, students may also conduct experiments at shared facilities within the university or visit other universities, research institutes, and companies.

In the Ikuta Campus laboratory, students can perform high-pressure experiments using diamond-anvil cells. Samples are compressed between diamonds, the hardest material in the world, by tightening screws. The samples are then heated using infrared lasers or electrical heating wires, enabling us to generate high-temperature and high-pressure conditions equivalent to those in Earth’s deepest interior. Some projects require persistent effort in difficult experimental preparation, but successful results bring a strong sense of achievement.

Left: diamond-anvil cell; right: experiment at SPring-8

• Inferring the internal structures of Earth and planets from measurements of material properties under high pressure
• Thermodynamic stable phase relations of minerals and iron alloys at high temperatures and pressures
• Understanding Earth’s evolutionary processes from element partition coefficients under high pressure
• Determining crystal structures at high temperatures and pressures using X-ray diffraction and spectroscopic measurements
• Redox reactions and large-scale volatile-element cycling in Earth’s interior
• Reproducing small-body impacts using flash-heating experiments with diamond-anvil cells
• Technical development for generating ultrahigh temperatures using resistively heated diamond-anvil cells
• Development of millisecond-scale high-speed spectroscopic methods for temperature determination toward melting-point measurements under high pressure