When Valery Levitas left Europe in 1999, he packed up a rotational diamond anvil cell and brought it to the United States. He and the researchers in his group are still using a much-advanced version of that pressing, twisting tool to squeeze and shear materials between two diamonds to see in situ, within the actual experiment, what happens and verify the researchers’ own theoretical predictions.
Unique straining affects phase transformations in silicon, a material vital for electronics
