Multi-anvil, high pressure apparatus: a half-century of development and progress

Abstract

H. Tracy Hall and the cubic-anvil apparatus which he developed at Brigham Young University to produce diamonds without the belt apparatus.

[Courtesy of the H. Tracy Hall Foundation].

In 1958, Tracy Hall invented the first multi-anvil, high pressure apparatus: a tetrahedral-anvil device capable of attaining simultaneous pressures of 10 GPa and temperatures above 3000 K. In the past half-century, multi-anvil apparatus (MAA) have evolved progressively and can now reach pressures close to 100 GPa at high temperatures. Many of these high pressure devices have been utilized in conjunction with in situ X-ray diffraction, especially with the advent of synchrotron radiation facilities in the early 1980s. There are a variety of technological approaches to generating high pressures in the laboratory, primarily motivated by the desire to study the behavior of materials at elevated pressures and temperatures; many of these approaches have been developed in the Earth science community due to the desire to replicate in the laboratory the P–T conditions of the Earth's deep interior. In addition to the dynamic techniques of shock-wave experiments, there have been two static techniques to achieve these goals: the diamond-anvil cell and the MAA. Although these two static techniques have occasionally been viewed as competitive, they are both useful and very complementary. The purpose of this paper is to review the development and progress in MAA.

Keywords:

• multi-anvil apparatus
• synchrotron X-radiation
• large-volume press

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many colleagues throughout the multi-anvil world who provided input and references to this review paper; many of them also reviewed a draft version in July 2011 and offered many helpful comments and suggestions, which I have endeavored to incorporate in the final version. However, I bear complete responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of this paper. These colleagues include Masaki Akaogi, Jun-ichi Ando, William Bassett, Ken Bertagnoli, Jiuhua Chen, William Durham, Dan Frost, Hideyuki Fujisawa, Osamu Fukunaga, Ken-ichi Funakoshi, Earl Graham, Harry Green, Robert Hazen, Toru Inoue, Tetsuo Irifune, Eiji Ito, Steven Jacobsen, Hiroyuki Kagi, Shun Karato, Yoshinori Katayama, Takaaki Kawazoe, Stefan Klotz, Tasashi Kondo, Andreas Kronenberg, Takehiro Kunimoto, Kurt Leinenweber, Baosheng Li, Peter McNutt, Hans-Joachim Mueller, Eiji Ohtani, Yu Nishihara, Norimasa Nishiyama, Dean Presnall, Charles Prewitt, Jian Qian, Paul Raterron, Osamu Shimomura, Rick Secco, Hartmut Spetzler, Eiichi Takahashi, Taro Takahashi, Yoshinori Tange, Wataru Utsumi, Michael Vaughan, Masao Wakatsuki, David Walker, Yanbin Wang, Donald Weidner, Takehiko Yagi, and Akira Yoneda. Finally, I thank Stefan Klotz for inviting me to write this review paper and for offering me advice and encouragement during the past two years. The preparation and writing of this review paper was supported by a NSF grant to the author: EAR 06-35651.

Notes

According to my esteemed colleague and friend, Jean-Paul Poirier, “apparatus” is a fourth declension noun in Latin and thus is spelled “…us” in both singular and plural forms.

Guided by advice from Akimoto with help from Takehiko Yagi, Mineo Kumazawa, Hiroshi Sawamoto, Eiji Ito, Osamu Fukunaga, Eiichi Takahashi, Osamu Shimomura, Eiji Ohtani, Shigeho Sueno, and Masao Wakatsuki.