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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 03 2019, @12:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the Potassium-Sodium-Lithium-Hydrium? dept.

After Decades of Hunting, Physicists Claim They've Made Quantum Material from Depths of Jupiter

A team of French researchers has posted a paper online in which they claim to have achieved the holy grail of extreme-pressure materials science: creating metallic hydrogen in a laboratory.

Physicists have suspected since the 1930s that under extreme pressures, hydrogen atoms — the lightest atoms on the periodic table, containing just a single proton each in the nuclei — might radically change their properties. Under normal circumstances, hydrogen doesn't conduct electricity well and tends to pair with other hydrogen atoms — much like oxygen does. But physicists believe that, subject to enough pressure, hydrogen will act as an alkali metal — a group of elements, including lithium and sodium, that each have a single electron in their outermost orbitals, which they exchange very easily. The whole periodic table is organized around this idea, with hydrogen placed above the other alkali metals in the first column. But the effect has never been conclusively seen in a laboratory.

Now, in a paper posted June 13 to the preprint journal arXiv, a team of researchers led by Paul Loubeyre of the French Atomic Energy Commission claims to have pulled it off. Crushed between the points of two diamonds to about 4.2 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level (425 gigapascals), they say their sample of hydrogen demonstrated metallic properties.

Abstract.

Also at Gizmodo and ScienceAlert.

Previously: Creation of Jupiter Interior, a Step Towards Room Temperature Superconductivity
Harvard Researchers Report Production and Analysis of Solid Metallic Hydrogen
Solid Metallic Hydrogen, Once Theory, Becomes Reality -- or Maybe Not?
Harvard University's Metallic Hydrogen Sample "Disappeared" or Ruined

Related: New Evidence of Superconductivity at Near Room Temperature


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:11PM (#862738)

    But... transparent aluminum is a thing.

    Anyway, I don't care what it is, if it's superconductive at room temperature I'll take it.