Robert Miller Hazen (born November 1, 1948) is an American mineralogist and astrobiologist. He is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States. Hazen is the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.
Early life
Hazen was born in Rockville Centre, New York, on November 1, 1948. His parents were Peggy Hazen (née Dorothy Ellen Chapin; 1918–2002) and Dan Hazen (né Daniel Francis Hazen, Jr.; 1918–2016). He spent his early childhood in Cleveland, near a fossil quarry where he collected his first trilobite at the age of about 9.
The Hazen family moved to New Jersey, where Robert's eight-grade teacher, Bill Welsh, observed Robert's interest in his collection of minerals. Hazen later recalled "He gave me a starter collection of 100 specimens, mineral field guides, and mimeographed directions to Paterson and Franklin, New Jersey." Hazen also had an early interest in music, starting with the piano at age 5, the violin at 6 and the trumpet at age 9.
Education
Hazen worked on his B.S. and S.M. (Master of Science) in Earth Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1971. He started with the intention of going into chemical engineering, but he was captivated by the enthusiasm of David Wones and converted to mineralogy. With Wones as advisor, he completed a masters thesis on cation substitution in trioctahedral micas; his publication in American Mineralogist was his first to be highly cited. He completed a Ph.D. in Mineralogy & Crystallography at Harvard University in 1975. His thesis, with Charles Burnham as advisor, involved learning how to use a 4-circle diffractometer to do high-pressure X-ray crystallography and applying it to olivine. This became a focus of his early career.
While a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University in England, Hazen worked with Charles Prewitt to determine empirical relations for the effect of temperature and pressure on interatomic distances in oxides and silicates.
Geophysical Laboratory
In 1976, Hazen joined the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory as a research associate. After a brief stint measuring optical properties of lunar minerals with Peter Bell and David Mao, he started to do X-ray crystallography with Larry Finger. He later recalled, "It was a match made in mineralogical heaven: Larry loved to write code, build machines, and analyze data; I loved to mount crystals, run the diffractometers, and write papers." They collaborated for two decades and determined about a thousand crystal structures at variable pressures and temperatures, work summarized in their 1982 book Comparative Crystal Chemistry.
Much of the work that Hazen was doing could be classified as mineral physics, a cross between geophysics and mineralogy. Although the field had pioneering contributions from the Nobel Prize winner Percy Bridgman and a student of his, Francis Birch, in the early- to mid-20th century, it did not have a name until the 1960s, and in the 1970s some scientists were concerned that a more interdisciplinary approach was needed to understand the relationship between interatomic forces and mineral properties. Hazen and Prewitt co-convened the first mineral physics conference; it was held on October 17–19, 1977 at the Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia.
High-temperature superconductors
Cooled to very low temperatures, some materials experience a sudden transition where electrical resistance drops to zero and any magnetic fields are expelled. This phenomenon is called superconductivity. Superconductors have a host of applications including powerful electromagnets, fast digital circuits and sensitive magnetometers, but the very low temperatures needed make the applications more difficult and expensive. Until the 1980s, no superconductors existed above . Then in 1986 two IBM researchers, Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller, found a ceramic material with a critical temperature of . This set off a frenzied search for higher critical temperatures.