CSE Chair Karki’s Paper Published in PNAS
June 18, 2019
BATON ROUGE, LA – LSU Computer Science & Engineering Professor and Division Chair
Bijaya Karki is co-author of a research paper that was recently published in the prestigious
scientific journal, Proceedings of National Academy of Science of the United States
of America (PNAS). The paper is evidence for Fe-Si-O liquid immiscibility at deep
Earth pressures.
In this collaborative project lead by Yale researchers, Karki uses first-principles-based computer simulation and visualization techniques, as well as complementing high-temperature experiments, to explore the behavior of molten iron alloys under extreme conditions of Earth’s outer core.
“Earth’s outer core is composed of a liquid iron alloy with up to 10 percent of unknown light elements, likely silicon, oxygen, sulfur, carbon, or hydrogen,” Karki said. “The release of these light elements upon freezing of the solid inner core plays an important role in sustaining Earth’s magnetic field, but the exact chemical makeup of the core is widely debated.”
The research, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Connecticut Space Grant Consortium, successfully demonstrated two distinct, molten liquid layers—an oxygen-poor, iron-silicon liquid and a less dense iron-silicon-oxygen liquid. To read the full article, visit https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/05/07/1821712116.
Karki is the LSU McDermott Inc. Endowed Professor and received his PhD in Computational Physics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, before joining LSU in 2003. He was awarded the NSF CAREER grant in 2004, won LSU Phi Kappa Phi and College of Science awards in 2008, as well as the LSU Rainmakers Award in 2010.
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