Wicks Lab graduate student Tyler Perez will speak at the 2020 Consortium for Material Properties Research in the Earth Science (COMPRES) annual meeting, which will be held virtually on August 14. He’ll present on his experimental work to determine the thermal conductivity of iron at high pressures, which is necessary to develop heat transport models of iron and iron rich alloys present in planet interiors. Tyler uses streaked optical pyrometry (SOP) measurements to determine temperature at three different levels in a stepped sample compressed by plasma and then further heated by a planar heat pulse from the stagnating plasma. Using a finite element heat diffusion package, he has developed an analysis method to fit the temperatures and model for them to find the conductivity. The laser-driven ramp compression experiments are run at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE).