Denis Rancourt - Scientific Research

Scientific Research

Rancourt has published over 100 articles in peer reviewed scientific journals. As a professor of physics, he was a member of the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Physics and member of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre His most cited works are in the area of Mössbauer spectroscopy where he developed a spectral lineshape analysis algorithm. This formed a basis for a now commercial spectral analysis software developed in his laboratory.

His laboratory has worked on the iron oxide hematite and has been cited in recent works on the remote measurements of the soil mineralogy on Mars. He worked on the physics of Invar for twenty years and in his last papers on the subject he claims to have solved the 100-year-old Invar problem of identifying the mechanistic origin of the alloy’s thermal expansion anomaly.

Rancourt first described the phenomenon of polarized superparamagnetic fluctuations which he named superferromagnetism. Scientific author Steen Morup introduced the same name for a similar phenomenon. His work on small magnetic particles was reviewed in the monograph series Reviews in Mineralogy

Starting in 2001, Rancourt led a research group in lake sediment early diagenesis and co-authored works in biogeochemistry about nutrient and metal cycling in aqueous envirnments. This allowed him to review cycling and recent historical changes in boreal forest lake sediments; which led him to write his essay about global warming and to post his views in public fora (see "Climate change essay" section).

In recent years, he has worked on reactive environmental Fe-oxyhydroxide nanoparticles and on iron cycling (see iron cycle) in soils. In 2008, his laboratory found evidence that the structure of ferrihydrite, which was first published in Science, is incorrect. In recent articles about soil formation, he helped explain how iron is fixed and mobilized.