Diamond Anvil Cell - History

History

Percy Williams Bridgman, the great pioneer of high-pressure research during the first half of the 20th century, revolutionized the field of high pressures with his development of an opposed anvil device with small flat areas that were pressed one against the other with a lever-arm. The anvils were made of a tungsten-carbon alloy (WC). This device could achieve pressure of a few gigapascals, and was used in electrical resistance and compressibility measurements. The invention of the diamond anvil cell in the late 1950s at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) by Weir, Lippincott, Van Valkenburg, and Bunting further refined the process. The principles of the DAC are similar to the Bridgman anvils but in order to achieve the highest possible pressures without breaking the anvils, they were made of the hardest known material: a single crystal diamond. The first prototypes were limited in their pressure range and there was not a reliable way to calibrate the pressure. During the following decades DACs have been successively refined, the most important innovations being the use of gaskets and the ruby pressure calibration. The DAC evolved to be the most powerful lab device for generating static high pressure. The range of static pressure attainable today extends to the estimated pressures at the Earth’s center (~360 GPa).