High pressure research

Researchers at

have developed a technique that could 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.

The researchers have achieved pressures near 10 million atmospheres using the 30 kilojoule ultraviolet Omega laser at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics in New York. They hope eventually to use the 2 megajoule laser of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility to achieve more than a billion atmospheres of pressure.

Diamond anvil cells squeeze liquids and solids to pressures of 4 to 5 million atmospheres, slightly higher than the pressure at the centre of the Earth. With diamond anvils, the temperature as well as pressure can be varied, and scientists can study the compressed samples for long periods.