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.