Abstract. Hard-sphere confinement is used to study helium atoms under pressure. The confined-helium Schrödinger equation is solved with a high accuracy by a Lagrangemesh method.The effects of high pressure on a helium gas can be estimated by studying the helium atom in a hard confinement, i.e. confined at the centre of an impenetrable spherical cavity, for different cavity radii. Contrary to the free helium atom, the confined helium has not been described with a very high accuracy until recently, when we have developed a Lagrange-mesh method to study this system [1]. This method improves by several order of magnitudes the accuracy of previous approaches [2][3][4].The outlines of the model are the following. The assumed-infinite-mass nucleus is fixed and the electrons are characterized by coordinates r 1 and r 2 with respect to this nucleus. In atomic units, the Hamiltonian of the helium atom readswhere r 12 = r 1 − r 2 and Δ 1 and Δ 2 are the Laplacians with respect to r 1 and r 2 . The confinement is introduced by forcing the wave function into some spherical cavity of radius R (r 1 , r 2 ≤ R). The wave function ψ(r 1 , r 2 , r 12 ) of an S state must thus verify the Schrödinger equationand vanishes at r 1 = R and r 2 = R. The coordinates (r 1 , r 2 , r 12 ) are advantageously replaced by the coordinates (u, v, w) defined over [0,1] byThe confinement implies that the wave function ψ(u, v, w) vanishes at u = 1, v = 1, and w = 1. The Schrödinger equation is solved by the Lagrange-mesh method [5][6][7], an approximate variational approach taking the form of a system of mesh equations by computing the Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements with a Gauss quadrature. Using the coordinates (u, v, w) is essential for an easy treatment of the confinement and an high accuracy of the Gauss quadrature. The ground-state energy and wave function are obtained by diagonalizing a rather large (matrix dimension≈ 10 3 ∼ 2×10 4 ) but sparse matrix. Ground-state energies and mean interparticle distances for several confinement radii R are given in table 1. The pressure acting on the confined helium atom is also given in table 1. It is a