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Sergei M. Stishov IS THe Recipient of The 2005 Bridgman Award
I have the
pleasure to announce that the winner of Bridgman Award 2005 is Professor
Sergei M. Stishov.
William J. Nellis
President of AIRAPT
Sergei
M. Stishov has made outstanding contributions to high pressure physics and
geophysics. Perhaps, his most well known accomplishment is discovery of a
high-pressure six-coordinated phase of SiO2. This discovery
demonstrated that silicates at high pressures collapse from four to
six-coordinated phases, which is the basis of our current picture of
silicates in the earth’s mantle.
As a graduate student, Prof. Stishov had the idea that
quartz might collapse to a higher-density polymorph under pressure at high
temperature and, if true, this would have important implications for
geophysics. In 1962 he found a collaborator at the Institute of High
Pressure Physics in Troitsk with whom to do experiments, found the denser
phase the first time he looked for it, and published the result in the
journal Geochimia. Shortly thereafter, the same polymorph was found in
nature, quenched to atmospheric pressure from high impact pressures and
temperatures at Meteorite Crater in Arizona. The new polymorph was named
stishovite. The full story is in S. M. Stishov, High
Pressure Research 13, 245-280 (1995).
Prof. Stishov has also provided an enormous body of
experimental data under pressures up to the 100 GPa range, including
equations of state measured by x-ray and neutron diffraction and Raman
scattering. He has found, for example, that soft materials, such as CsI,
become metallic and hard materials, such as diamond, are extremely stable at
high pressures. His neutron diffraction experiments on solid hydrogen to 31
GPa are the only such data on this material at high pressures These results
are of fundamental importance for condensed matter physics and for the
science of giant planets inside and outside our solar system.
Professor Stishov has held numerous important
positions. He is Director of the Institute of High Pressure Physics and is
a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1993 he
has been a consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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