ABSTRACT
Historically high-pressure research has been an area heavily dependent on the availability of the experimental equipment. In fact, many of the discoveries in high-pressure science followed promptly breakthroughs in instrumentation development which provided researchers with higher pressure limits or larger sample volumes. However, the opposite is also true and the biggest developments in instrumentation were driven by anticipated discoveries in science. Indeed a lot of the development of high-pressure equipment in the past two hundred years have been driven by the quest to create synthetic diamonds [1]. Another good example of the interconnection between high-pressure cell development and scientific research is the continuing search for metallic hydrogen. The first prediction of hydrogen becoming a metal under pressure has been published in 1935 [2]. Since then there was a number of estimates of the pressure at which hydrogen would become metallic but every time experimentalists managed to achieve these pressures and could not find the metallic behaviour [3], theorists would refine their calculations to predict a new higher pressure of metallization [4]. And so the quest for building pressure cells capable of achieving yet higher pressures continues.
