Ashkan Salamat

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Associate Professor of Physics

Director, Nevada Extreme Conditions Laboratory

Expertise: Physics, Chemistry

Biography

Ashkan Salamat is an associate professor with UNLV's Department of Physics and Astronomy. Salamat is also the director of the Nevada Etreme Conditions Laboratory (NEXCL), a multidisciplinary center that explores fundamental experimental, computational, and engineering problems of materials under high pressure.

The central theme of Salamat’s research uses unique thermodynamic pathways to unlock remarkable new chemistries or drive physical phenomenon that would be unachievable by any other means, leading to materials that do not exist naturally in nature. This is often accomplished in the laboratory by using extreme scales of pressure, temperature, and time.

Prior to joining UNLV, Salamat was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, researching warm dense hydrogen. In 2019, Salamat was one of just 46 university professors nationwide – and the first from UNLV – to earn an Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Education

Ph.D., Physical Chemistry, University College London, UK
M.Sci, Chemistry, Imperial College, UK

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Ashkan Salamat In The News

Researchers Discover a New Phase of Ice by Squeezing Water Between Diamonds

Smithsonian Magazine

When someone talks about frozen water, they typically mean the ice cubes in a cold drink or the vast glaciers in Earth’s coldest corners. What most people don’t know, however, is that H2O molecules can arrange themselves into many different types, or phases, of ice with various structures. Researchers have discovered more than 20 of these phases, the latest of which—called Ice XXI—a team recently created under extreme pressure, allowing water to turn to ice at room temperature.

The scientific quest to explore the hidden complexity of ice

Scientific American

Chances are that all your encounters with frozen water—while trudging through slushy winter streets, perhaps, or treating yourself to cool summer lemonades—have been confined to one structural form of ice, dubbed Ih, with the h referring to its crystal lattice’s hexagonal nature. But there is so much more to ice than that.

‘Revolutionary’ blue crystal resurrects hope of room temperature superconductivity

Science.org

Has the quest for room temperature superconductivity finally succeeded? Researchers at the University of Rochester (U of R), who previously were forced to retract a controversial claim of room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, are back with an even more spectacular claim. This week in Nature they report a new material that superconducts at room temperature—and not much more than ambient pressures.

Less water, less boating, less tourism

Water and tourism woes at Lake Mead, a breakdown of the Inflation Reduction Act and a scientific discovery at UNLV.

Articles Featuring Ashkan Salamat

UNLV Newsmakers 2022: August

a female student sits in the grass by a tree reading a book

| September 1, 2022

A roundup of prominent news stories highlighting university pride, research, and community collaboration.

Low Pressure, High Stakes: UNLV Physicists Make Major Gains in Race for Room-Temperature Superconductivity

| August 3, 2022

Newly published research builds on team’s landmark 2020 discovery of a room-temperature superconductor by replicating results with even greater efficiency.

UNLV Newsmakers 2022: March