High pressure

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Great force distributed over a small area

title: "High pressure" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["materials-science", "pressure"] description: "Great force distributed over a small area" topic_path: "science/chemistry" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_pressure" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Great force distributed over a small area ::

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In science and engineering, the study of high pressure examines its effects on materials and the design and construction of devices, such as a diamond anvil cell, which can create high pressure. High pressure usually means pressures of thousands (kilobars) or millions (megabars) oftimes atmospheric pressure (about 1 bar).

History and overview

Percy Williams Bridgman received a Nobel Prize in1946 for advancing this area of physics by two magnitudes of pressure ((MPa) to(GPa)). The founders of this field include also Harry George Drickamer, Tracy Hall, Francis P. Bundy, , and .

It was by applying high pressure as well as high temperature to carbon that synthetic diamonds were first produced alongside many other interesting discoveries. Almost any material when subjected to high pressure will compact itself into a denser form; for example, quartz (also called silica or silicon dioxide) will first adopt a denser form known as coesite, then upon application of even higher pressure, form stishovite. These two forms of silica were first discovered by high-pressure experimenters, but then found in nature at the site of a meteor impact.

Chemical bonding is liable to change under high pressure, when the P * Vterm in the free energy becomes comparable to the energies of typical chemical bonds at around . Among the most striking changes are metallization of oxygen at (rendering oxygen a superconductor), and transition of sodium from a nearly-free-electron metal to a transparent insulator at. At ultimately high compression, however, all materials will metallize ().

High-pressure experimentation has led to the discovery of the types of minerals which are believed to exist in the deep mantle of the Earth, such as silicate perovskite, which is thought to make up half of the Earth's bulk, and post-perovskite, which occurs at the core-mantle boundary and explains many anomalies inferred for that region.

Pressure "landmarks"

Typical pressures reached by large-volume presses: upto
Pressures that can be generated inside diamond anvil cells:
Pressure at center of the Earth:
Highest pressures ever achieved in shock waves: over100,000 GPa

References

(4 May 2007). "The Chemical Imagination at Work in Very Tight Places". [[Wiley-VCH]].
(20 July 2016). "Terapascal static pressure generation with ultrahigh yield strength nanodiamond". [[American Association for the Advancement of Science]].
(29 May 2007). "Achieving high-density states through shock-wave loading of precompressed samples". [[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]].

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