This is a pivotal time in the history of physics. There are two major movements underway.
The first movement is the ability to create quantum mechanical pressures in the laboratory
to explore new states of matter. Matter that has never been formed before on Earth,
but frankly is quite likely common throughout the universe.
The second major development underway is the discovery of more than 4,000 planets.
And that's outside of our solar system.
These planets, in some sense, are potential platforms for life,
and they likely contain matter at the same extreme pressures
that we can just now create in the laboratory.
Now, understanding the nature and quality and implications of these planets really rests
on understanding these deep interior states under the crushing influence of gravity.
We are at a stage of technological development
where we can probe the conditions of nature directly in the lab.
And that is a new capability that enables this from being much more than a theoretical science,
but something that we can access directly and control; and then apply to the natural world.
CMAP, the Center for Matter at Atomic Pressures, is a new NSF Physics Frontier Center.
This sits at the confluence of these two main movements in physics.
And this is a collaboration among MIT; University of California, Davis;
University of California, Berkeley; Princeton; University of Buffalo;
Livermore Laboratories; and the University of Rochester, which houses
the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. We're including researchers ranking
from astronomers to condensed matter and plasma physicists, fluid dynamicists,
planetary scientists, material scientists and the like, all intermingling. I've been waiting
for this type of collaboration for a long time. CMAP is jumping in at the ground floor
to launch a new field that is at the interface between these experimentalists
and the observers and the theorists in exoplanets in particular. Here at the LLE,
we have these powerful lasers that allow us access to conditions
that are hard to achieve on a tabletop. We've already seen a lot of very exotic phenomena.
So we've seen things like what are materials that are normally insulators like hydrogen
will become metallic as you compress it. On the other hand, you have things like
alkali metals, like sodium. As you compress it, it becomes transparent.
You can fundamentally change the basic character of materials just by squeezing it down.
What starts to happen is the individual atoms start to overlap in a quantum mechanical
way and we don't have good models to understand exactly what happens when that happens,
how that changes their chemical properties, how that changes how different materials mix
with each other, how that changes how they absorb and release heat,
how that changes their electrical conductivity and their thermal conductivity.
One of the projects we're discussing is the mixture of hydrogen and helium,
so it is relevant for gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn. Out of CMAP,
we will actually probe with experimental methods how hydrogen and helium behave
under these extreme conditions. So really very, very important;
has never been done before. So once we figure out the kind of status of
Jupiter's interior structure, then we can make an educated guess about its formation and evolution.
We are used to experiencing matter at one atmospheric pressure. That's
our experience on earth. However, what we don't realize,
we take for granted, is that most places the pressure is not one atmosphere, it can go
up to, you know, 1,000 gigapascals. Just unimaginable pressures.
There's a mysterious type of exoplanet out there
that is two to three times the size of Earth that has no solar system counterpart.
We call these planets sub-Neptunes and we don't know what they're made of.
We need CMAP to understand these sub-Neptune exoplanets.
What they could be made of, how they would evolve and what their atmospheres might look like today.
There is so much that we don't know yet that this convergence and intense attention from the Center
is going to lead to spectacular discoveries.
It's the journey of exploration - when you embark on an experimental regime
that hasn't been touched before. And so part of the excitement is just
exploring new physics. [In terms of particle arrangements...]
One of the big efforts that CMAP actually is leading is to try to recruit new team members.
So the educational program that we're working on at the moment is outreaching to
schools in Rochester and later on, other places in the country where the other parts of
the Center are located. And the idea is to actually mix different generations,
mix different backgrounds, mix different experiences to actually
make high school students and undergraduates and graduate students feel welcome
in our community to pursue the science. The research together with education and
outreach will inspire a new generation of scientists to explore the universe.
I fully expect that with this type of laboratory experiment, we'll be able to unlock the nature of
a lot of these astrophysical observations, be able to tell what types of planets
would look sort of like our own in terms of, say, the ability to host potential life, but also
just creating revolutionary states of matter here on Earth that would change technology forever.
Those types of things really excite me for the future.