What is this website?
Thanks for visiting my website! This website is mostly a blog for things I am learning in school and outside. My interests are broad and include all the subjects you see in the website navigation menu above. One of my hobbies is programming, hence the creation of this website. I will be updating and changing the website as I go. I created the website through the Astro tutorial As of January 2023 I do not know any JavaScript and was still able to follow along pretty well. Most of my programming experience is with python, which I use a lot at school for data exploration, visualization and some light numerical modeling.
What I do
I am currently in a PhD program studying Geochemistry. I have been dipping my toes into a few different projects for my thesis work in completely different fields.One of them is a project on isotope fractionation of Zinc metal in an electrochemical cell. We are using an electrochemical cell in order to have greater control over the driving force of the reaction. This reaction is essentially just electroplating an electrode with Zn. We then scrape the metal off and run it through a mass spectrometer to understand the isotopic breakdown of the deposited material. Related to this, we are working with researchers from Europe and Canada to do similar experiments on Mercury(Hg) metal. There are not many people on this planet that can safely handle Hg metal in an electrochemical cell (our European collaborators ) and then again in a mass spectrometer(our Canadian collaborators).
The other project I am just beginning to dive into is in regards to the behavior of Manganese (Mn) metal under extreme pressures. In order to get Mn to these high pressures we put it in something called a diamond anvil cell. This sounds like some fancy piece of equipment but it is actually an extremely simple device. If you have seen a diamond before with a typical round cut, you would know it has a large flat top that comes down to a point. Usually in rings and other jewelry, the large flat top is on display, but for the diamond anvil cell we are interested in the pointy end which is called the culet. Knowing that pressure is the amount of force per unit area, we can see that using a diamond with a small culet, we can achieve very high pressures. That is exactly what the diamond anvil cell does! It had a piston and a cylinder. In each of these components we have a diamond with the culet facing upwards. Pressing these diamonds together with a sample in between lets us compress materials to extremely high pressures. Probing the state of these materials makes use of another useful property of diamonds. Diamonds are optically transparent, meaning we can shoot light through them. So to understand the structure of the material under pressure we can use something called X-ray diffraction in which we shoot X-rays at the sample and see how they are scattered. This will tell us about the structure of the atoms and how they are all lined up, or if they are lined up at all.