High-pressure mineral physics is a field that is strongly driven by the development of new
technology. Fifty years ago, when experimentally achievable pressures were limited to just 25
GPa, little was known about the mineralogy of the Earth's lower mantle. Silicate perovskite, the
likely dominant mineral of the deep Earth, was identified only when the high-pressure
techniques broke the pressure barrier of 25 GPa in the 1970s. However, as the maximum
achievable pressure reached beyond 1 Megabar (100 GPa) and even to the pressure of Earth's
core on minute samples, new discoveries were increasingly fostered by the development of new
analytical techniques and improvements in sensitivity and precision of existing techniques.
Today, as this volume highlights, we can measure a wide range of physical and chemical
properties at ever higher pressure and temperature conditions on increasingly complex samples