High pressure is a powerful tool like temperature to help us discover new materials with novel structures and abnormal physicochemical properties. For instance, precious diamonds can be artificially synthesized under a single high pressure condition through using much cheaper carbon sources such as graphite while super-hard titanium dioxide with high symmetries and coordination numbers can be achieved just through a simple squeezing process.

Here, we will talk about the recent progress on the pressurization of carbon and TiO 2 materials in our group, and specially focus on how high pressure can induce the structural transitions of normal materials? As a common but particular experimental tool, why not introduce high pressure into your research and find new materials/phenomena together with us?