Equipment: Acquisition of an EDS detector and Carbon Coater for Quantitative FEG-SEM Analysis

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will permit the acquisition of an Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDS) and a new carbon coater, with a high-precision thickness monitor for the University of California at Berkeley. These purchases will augment a new Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FEG-SEM) facility to address a wide range of geological problems. The acquired facilities will also represent the focus of a new graduate-level course on electron beam microanalytical methods in the Earth and Material Sciences. The project team will also work with an undergraduate student to develop open-source Python3 tools for visualization and interpretation of spatial chemical data to help the community move away from proprietary software. In situ chemical analysis forms an integral part of the project teams research in volcanology, igneous petrology, and mantle geochemistry. The capabilities of the new EDS detector provide the ability to collect rapid, multi-scale geochemical information that will be vital for petrological analysis of past volcanic eruptions and has potential to provide near real-time petrological monitoring of future volcanic activity (e.g., assessing crystal zoning to obtain transport times, crystal chemistry to determine magma storage depths). Fully quantitative chemical mapping via EDS is also critical to research on melt transport in magmatic mush zones and the onset of sulfide saturation during magmatic differentiation. Furthermore, the new equipment will also be utilised by other researchers at UC Berkeley, promoting interdisciplinary collaborations. For example, chemical data from EDS mapping will be combined with rocks magnetic data to determine sediment redox chemistry in ancient environments, and to assess the timescales between breakage, sintering and mixing of explosive mafic magmas. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.