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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the location-is-up-in-the-air dept.

A metallic hydrogen sample that made the news recently has disappeared, possibly returning to its gaseous state:

Scientists achieved the "holy grail of high-pressure physics" last month, when physicists from Harvard University claimed they'd successfully turned hydrogen into a metal - something researchers had been struggling to achieve for more than 80 years. And not only had they made the material, but they were also the first to stably keep it in the lab, making it the only sample of metallic hydrogen anywhere on Earth. But now the team has bad news - the sample has disappeared.

The metallic hydrogen was being stored at temperatures around 80 Kelvin (-193 degrees Celsius and -316 degrees Fahrenheit), and at incredibly high pressures between two diamonds in a type of vice. But further testing around a week ago caused the diamonds to break and the vice to fail, and the researchers haven't been able to find a trace of the metallic hydrogen since.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's been destroyed - the sample was only around 1.5 micrometres thick, and 10 micrometres in diameter - a fifth the diameter of a strand of human hair - so it's possible it's stable somewhere and missing. But it's also a possibility that, once the pressure of the diamond vice broke, the hydrogen dissipated back into a gas, which suggests that the material isn't stable at room pressure - one of the material's predicted properties.

Previous coverage:
Harvard Researchers Report Production and Analysis of Solid Metallic Hydrogen
Solid Metallic Hydrogen, Once Theory, Becomes Reality -- or Maybe Not?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:28PM (#472839)

    Had you scrolled down on your first link, you would have found:

    chiefly British spelling of vise

    Now looking where the site is located, we find: [sciencealert.com]

    The ScienceAlert website at sciencealert.com (the “Site”) is owned and operated by ScienceAlert Pty. Ltd., a company registered in Australia […]

    OK, so BE doesn't necessarily apply. So let's do a short search for "australian spelling vice vise" to find [grammarist.com] very early on:

    Outside American English, the vise spelling rarely appears. The gripping tool is instead spelled vice.

    Australia is certainly outside American English. So "vice" clearly is not an error, but the correct spelling at the place where the publisher is located.

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