Lab in a DAC – high-pressure crystal chemistry in a diamond-anvil cell

Abstract

The diamond‐anvil cell (DAC) was invented 60 years ago, ushering in a new era for material sciences, extending research into the dimension of pressure. Most structural determinations and chemical research have been conducted at ambient pressure, i.e. the atmospheric pressure on Earth. However, modern experimental techniques are capable of generating pressure and temperature higher than those at the centre of Earth. Such extreme conditions can be used for obtaining unprecedented chemical compounds, but, most importantly, all fundamental phenomena can be viewed and understood from a broader perspective. This knowledge, in turn, is necessary for designing new generations of materials and applications, for example in the pharmaceutical industry or for obtaining super‐hard materials. The high‐pressure chambers in the DAC are already used for a considerable variety of experiments, such as chemical reactions, crystallizations, measurements of electric, dielectric and magnetic properties, transformations of biological materials as well as experiments on living tissue. Undoubtedly, more applications involving elevated pressure will follow. High‐pressure methods become increasingly attractive, because they can reduce the sample volume and compress the intermolecular contacts to values unattainable by other methods, many times stronger than at low temperature. The compressed materials reveal new information about intermolecular interactions and new phases of single‐ and multi‐component compounds can be obtained. At the same time, high‐pressure techniques, and particularly those of X‐ray diffraction using the DAC, have been considerably improved and many innovative developments implemented. Increasingly more equipment of in‐house laboratories, as well as the instrumentation of beamlines at synchrotrons and thermal neutron sources are dedicated to high‐pressure research.

Glycine: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

“…The pronounced effect of the compression-decompression protocol on the polymorphism of organic compounds was reported for many other compounds. [94][95][96][111][112][113][114][115] Another issue that deserves noting is that crystallization at high pressures occurs always in a confined space. Crystallization of glycine under various confined conditions (in micropores, micelles, entrapped into matrices) usually gives the least stable β-form.…”

Tribochemistry, Mechanical Alloying, Mechanochemistry: What is in a Name?

“…For example, mechanical treatment of a single powder particle will still involve geometric distortion of its molecular substituents (Haruta et al, 2019), and there remains the potential for molecular or atomic electronic excitation/emission processes to occur. This behavior is clear for example in high pressure experiments of molecular solids, wherein mechanical action of the bulk lattice yields geometric (Fabbiani et al, 2005) and electronic distortions (Poręba et al, 2019) or excitations (Tulip and Bates, 2009) at the molecular or atomic level (Boldyreva, 2019;Katrusiak, 2019;Zakharov and Boldyreva, 2019). The dynamical stressing (compression or shearing) of solids can also cause chemical species within the solid state to approach each other at high velocities, akin to molecular collisions in fluids.…”

Lanthanide Upconverted Luminescence for Simultaneous Contactless Optical Thermometry and Manometry–Sensing under Extreme Conditions of Pressure and Temperature

“… 3 − 6 , 8 − 14 However, to imitate and simulate such conditions on a laboratory scale, namely, to achieve very high pressure values, from several tens to even hundreds of GPa, it is necessary to generate a very high force acting per small area. 1 − 3 …”

“…Such diamond anvils are transparent, are ultrahard, and have a very small culet, contact surface with the sample, and their use allows the generation of very high force and simultaneous observation of the effect of compression (pressure) on the properties of the material. 1 − 3 …”