A significant milestone was the acquisition of the new mass spectrometer (Noblesse 5F5M), essential for advancing our research. While the project officially began on September 1, 2023, the instrument was delivered on June 13, 2024—a delay of nearly nine months. Following delivery, the initial weeks focused on rigorous testing and standard analyses as part of Work Package WP0 (Installation).
In July 2024, we conducted a two-week sampling mission in Iceland, collecting fresh glass samples for WP1 (“Neon in the Mantle”) and to support Romain Sauvalle’s PhD research. This enabled us to pioneer the Bubble-by-Bubble analysis technique, combining an ablation laser with the new spectrometer, alongside step-crushing experiments. The results, now in press at Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Sauvalle et al., 2025), mark a major methodological advancement.
Concurrently, we advanced WP2 (“Magmatic Processes”) through experimental studies on neon isotopic fractionation during magma degassing. Led by newly recruited research engineer Elena Nunez and in collaboration with Dr. Bruno Scaillet, our findings confirmed significant fractionation effects (Nunez et al., 2025). Additionally, the post-doc Jehiel Nteme, a molecular dynamics specialist, further validated these observations through computational modeling. These results were presented at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague (Nteme et al. 2025).
For WP3 (“Capture of Atmosphere”), we investigated neon solubility in synthetic melts with variable MgO content, simulating conditions of the primordial magma ocean. Spearheaded by the post doc Carolina Cardoso-Dantes and supported by Dr. Scaillet, our experiments revealed that higher MgO content reduces neon solubility, challenging previous estimates of solar neon dissolution. These findings are now published in Cardoso et al. (2025).]
