Latest Diamond anvil cell Stories

When materials are stressed, they eventually change shape. Initially these changes are elastic, and reverse when the stress is relieved. When the material's strength is exceeded, the changes become permanent. This could result in the material breaking or shattering, but it could also re-shape the material, such as a hammer denting a piece of metal. Understanding this last group of changes is the focus of research from a team including Carnegie's Ho-kwang "Dave" Mao. Their breakthrough...

The study of materials at extreme conditions took a giant leap forward with the discovery of a way to generate super high pressures without using shock waves whose accompanying heat turns solids to liquid. This discovery will allow scientists for the first time to reach static pressure levels exceeding four million atmospheres, a high-pressure environment where new unique compounds could be formed, materials change their chemical and physical properties and metals become insulators.  An...

Caltech researchers obtain highest-pressure vibrational spectrum of iron Identifying the composition of the earth's core is key to understanding how our planet formed and the current behavior of its interior. While it has been known for many years that iron is the main element in the core, many questions have remained about just how iron behaves under the conditions found deep in the earth. Now, a team led by mineral-physics researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)...

ESRF inaugurates unique new X-ray facility Scientists will soon be exploring matter at temperatures and pressures so extreme it can only be produced for microseconds using powerful pulsed lasers. Matter in such states is present in the Earth's liquid iron core, 2500 kilometers beneath the surface, and also in elusive "warm dense matter" inside large planets like Jupiter. A new X-ray beamline ID24 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, allows a new...

An amorphous diamond – one that lacks the crystalline structure of diamond, but is every bit as hard – has been created by a Stanford-led team of researchers. But what good is an amorphous diamond? "Sometimes amorphous forms of a material can have advantages over crystalline forms," said Yu Lin, a Stanford graduate student involved in the research. The biggest drawback with using diamond for purposes other than jewelry is that even though it is the hardest material known, its...

By Anne M Stark, LLNLBy combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics for something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses.Aerogels are a class of materials that exhibit the lowest density, thermal conductivity, refractive index and sound velocity of any bulk solid. Aerogels are among the most versatile materials available for technical applications due to their many...

Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks.Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS' Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process involves biology: Prehistoric plants died and changed into oil and gas while sandwiched between layers...

Of the 92 naturally occurring elements, add another to the list of those that are superconductors.James S. Schilling, Ph.D., professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Mathew Debessai "” his doctoral student at the time "” discovered that europium becomes superconducting at 1.8 K (-456 °F) and 80 GPa (790,000 atmospheres) of pressure, making it the 53rd known elemental superconductor and the 23rd at high pressure.Debessai, who receives his...

By shooting the high-energy Omega laser onto precompressed samples of planetary fluids, scientists are gaining a better understanding of the evolution and internal structure of Jupiter, Saturn and extrasolar giant planets.The properties of dense helium (He) "” which happens to be a principal constituent of giant gas planets like Jupiter "” at thermodynamic conditions between those of condensed matter and high-temperature plasmas are theoretically challenging and unexplored...

BERKELEY -- Combining diamond anvils and powerful lasers, laboratory researchers have developed a technique that should be able to squeeze materials to pressures 100 to 1,000 times greater than possible today, reproducing conditions expected in the cores of supergiant planets.Until now, these pressures have only been available experimentally next to underground nuclear explosions."This lets us explore a new regime of chemistry and reproduce the conditions of more extreme...