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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?


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:18PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:18PM (#472935) Journal

    I like for those commentating about science news on the internet to know the difference between US English and everyone else's English.

    That's certainly fair enough! My apologies to Fiona MacDonald and to my fellow soy-based lifeforms.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:52PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:52PM (#473063)

    No pressure to apologise. We wouldn't want you to turn metallic on us.