High pressure functional materials which display optical, electrical, magnetic, dielectiric, and thermal properties, are ubiquitous and play an essential role in our daily lives. This is apparent from the silicon chip with its ever-increasing power, the light-emitting materials at the heart of today's telecommunicati......

The composition and evolution of the earth and planets has great influence on the emergence and development of the life. However, information of the earth's deep interior and the planets cannot be accessed directly, since no borehole can be drilled more than twelve kilometer by present techniques, which is far less t......

Chemistry is the center of natural science. Its core mission is to create and understand new substances. The new substances and the understanding of them in the view of chemistry are the foundation of further research in other subjects. High pressure science and techniques provide a new dimension for chemistry, in which ......

At the turn of the 21st Century, the critical shortage of abundant, affordable, and clean energy demands greatly accelerated advances in energy research on materials. Incremental progresses are no longer sufficient; out-of-the-box approaches and radically different, novel technologies based on unexpected scientific disco......

Super-hard material is a material whose Vickers hardness exceeds 40 GPa. These materials have gained a lot of interest due to their extensive application in industrial areas, such as the polishing, cutting tools, and hard wear protective coatings. Synthetic diamond and cubic boron nitride are major commercial high pressu......

Significant advances in high pressure research have been made in recent years together with rapid progress in synchrotron radiation techniques. Brilliant synchrotron x-rays provide excellent probes for micron-scale samples for a variety of experimental measurements at high pressure. Complex samples at increasingly higher......

The primary effect of high pressure is volume contraction and hence the shortening of interatomic and intermolecular distances. Along with structural modifications are various changes in physical properties such as electric/thermal conductivity, viscosity, melting and magnetic properties. Exploring and understanding the ......

Nanomaterials are typically referred to as the materials with a length scale less than 100 nm. Over the past decade, nanomaterials, including man-sized metals/alloys, composites, polymers, glasses, ceramics, biological materials and carbon-based nanomaterials, have attracted enormous interest in various fields such as ph......

High pressure optical spectroscopyA broad range of optical spectroscopy techniques are used by scientists in SHARPS. These techniques mainly include high pressure Raman spectroscopy, Brillouin scattering, infrared spectroscopy, and optical reflectivity.Raman spectroscopy is one of the most informative probes for studies ......