Extreme Pressure

What is High Pressure Materials Science?
High pressure material science research involves studying the properties and behaviors of materials under extreme pressure conditions, typically ranging from tens of thousands to millions of atmospheres. These high-pressure environments can significantly alter the physical, chemical, and structural characteristics of materials, leading to the discovery of new phases, novel properties, and enhanced performance characteristics that are not observable under standard conditions. Once, we demonstrate these new phases existing at high pressures and confirm their superior performance, we find effective ways to find them back to atmospheric pressure (ATM) using sophisticated high pressure growth chambers.

Our Research Directions within High Pressure Materials Science
Our team focuses on three main pillars around phase transition, discovery of novel material phases, and enhanced material properties within this research direction. More specifically, our team specializes on investigating material behavior of atomically thin 2D materials as well as layered van der Walls (vdW) under high pressures;

Unlocking New Phase Transitions: Under high pressure, materials undergo phase transitions, resulting in the emergence of new crystalline structures with distinct characteristics. For instance, graphite can undergo transformation into diamond, while even simple molecules like hydrogen can adopt metallic properties. Within this direction, we investigate phase transition in layered vdW materials under high pressure by increasing the interlayer (2D sheet to 2D sheet) interactions. While doing so, we aim to discover completely new material systems.

Synthesis of Novel Materials: High-pressure techniques also allow our team to fabricate materials that are challenging or impossible to create under normal atmospheric conditions. Our team is part of the ~$13M investment by NSF for the new FORCE research directions which is enabling our team to unlock new phases of material and discover completely new material systems in the universe! These innovative materials include high Tc superconductors, new excitonic materials, and quantum material systems.

Enhanced Properties: Materials exposed to high pressure often manifest enhanced mechanical strength, heightened hardness, or superior electronic traits. This heightened performance renders them invaluable across a spectrum of industrial applications, spanning electronics, aerospace, and energy storage solutions. We intentionally apply large hydrostatic pressure on excitonic semiconductor, chiral materials, and other traditional materials to understand how fundamental properties change under pressure and what new functionalities can be attained.

Fundamental questions

Select publications

Superconductors under high pressure
High pressure studies in action
Example high pressure cell
Our high pressure setup integrated with optical spectroscopy
Cover image on Advanced Materials displaying our work
Our 6000 ton press will allow very large samples to be produced for a wide array of measurements and observations that cannot be made on smaller samples. The larger sample volume also allows for more complicated experiments.
Our cubic press will have two major functions. In a single-stage mode: rapid synthesis of large samples from 1–7 GPa, and rapid pressure-temperature studies in the same region. In a double-stage mode: detailed work at > 30 GPa that current large-volume capabilities have not yet reached.
Our high-pressure torsional device will be used to study material behavior and phase transitions caused by strain and will be used to create novel samples for TEM studies of deformational textures, phase transitions, and other phenomena.
PNAS 2024 article