“Excuse me, they said there’s a coffee shop over here somewhere. Could you please point me to it?”

“Sure. Al’s place is right around the next corner, behind the Physics building. I’ll walk you over there.”

“Oh, I don’t want to bother you.”

“No bother, it’s my coffee time anyway. Hi, Al, new customer for you.”

“Hi, Sy. What’ll it be, Ms … ?”

“I’m Susan, Susan Kim. A mocha latte, please, Al. And you’re Sy …?”

“Moire. Sy Moire, Consulting Physicist. Who’s the ‘they’ that told you about Al’s?”

“An office staffer in the Chemistry Department. I just joined the research faculty over there.”

Al’s ears perk up. “A chemist, at last! For some reason they don’t show up over here very much.”

“Hah, I bet it’s because they’re used to drinking lab coffee from beakers.”

“As a matter of fact, Sy, I do have a coffee beaker. A glass‑worker friend added a very nice handle to a 500‑milliliter beaker for me. It’s not unpacked yet which is why I was looking for a coffee shop. This latte is very good, Al, better than lab coffee any day.”

“Thanks. So what’s the news in Science, guys?”

“Mmm… On Mars, the Insight mission‘s ‘mole’ thermal probe has finally buried itself completely, on its way down we hope to its targeted 5‑meter depth. And the OSIRIS‑REx mission to Asteroid Bennu successfully collected maybe a little too much asteroid sample. One rock fragment blocked the sampler’s lid like a bit of souvenir sticking out of a tourist’s carry‑on bag. Fortunately the engineers figured out how to stow the stuff more neatly for the two‑year trip back home. How about in the Chemistry world, Susan?”

“Hmm… Ranga Dias and his team at the University of Rochester used a diamond anvil cell to—”

“Wait — a diamond anvil? Like the Village Blacksmith but made of diamond?”

“No, Al, nothing like that. Diamond is the hardest substance we know of, right? A DAC uses a pair of quarter‑carat gem‑quality diamonds pushing against each other to create a small volume of crazy high pressure in the space between them, up into the million‑atmosphere range. Here, I’ve got a gorgeous photo of one on my phone…

“To give you an idea of the scale, that square black gasket between the two diamonds is a piece of rhenium metal foil that’s a quarter of a millimeter thick. The reaction vessel itself is a hole they spark-drilled through the gasket. This is teeny, nanoliter chemistry.”

“OK, they’re small diamonds, but .. DIAMONDS! I bet they crack some of them. That’s got to be ex‑PENsive, our tax dollars going CRUNCH!.”

“Not really. You’re right, some do crack, up around the seven million atmosphere mark. But here’s the fun part — the researchers don’t pay market price for those diamonds. They come from the government’s stock of smuggled goods that Customs agents have confiscated at the border.”

“Why go to all that trouble? What’s wrong with test tubes and beakers?”

“Because not all chemistry takes place at atmospheric pressure, Sy. High pressure crams molecules closer together. They get in each other’s way, maybe deform each other enough to react in ways that they wouldn’t under conditions we’d call ‘normal.’ Even water has something like 17 different forms of ice under different pressure‑temperature conditions. The whole discipline of high‑pressure chemistry got started because the seismologists needed to know how minerals transform, melt, flow and react under stress. The thing about diamond is that it doesn’t transform, melt, flow or react.”

“Oo, oo, you can see through a diamond, sorta. I’ll betcha people pipe laser beams down them, right?”

“Absolutely, Al. Before lasers came along researchers were using regular light and optics to track events in a pressurized DAC. Lasers and fiber optics completely changed the game. Not just for observation — you can use intense light to heat things up, get them even closer to deep‑Earth conditions.”

“I suppose chemists are like physicists — once a new tool becomes available everybody dives in to play.”

“You know it. There’s thousands of papers out there detailing work that used a DAC.”

“So what did Dias report on?”

~~ Rich Olcott