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Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, "was way off." It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms -- at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal. All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up. Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren't up to the task. "Diamond failure," they note, "is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH," where SMH means "solid metallic hydrogen" rather than "shaking my head." The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample. After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally -- they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen's breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals The study has been published in the journal Science.
So, we could pump 3.8 billion mega-watts through a wire no thicker than a human hair.
All known and predicted superconductors have a magnetic field limit where superconductivity breaks down. The higher the current density in a wire, the higher the magnetic field strength, so hence there is a limit to how much current you can put through a superconductor of a given size, and it is low enough to mean you need decent sized wires still. The exact limit depends on the material and the temperature, and so you see high temperature superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures used with the more expensive liquid helium so more current can be crammed through them.
, but the way superconductors work is by essentially pushing the electron next to them to the side.
All conductors work this way. The actual drift speed of electrons in even a copper wire is quite small.
you could effectively have faster-than-light communication
Nope, the electrons push on each other using the electromagnetic force, which moves at the speed of light or slower. The electrons at the end of the wire don't push on the other end instantly, and the force gets communicated down the wire at a speed slower than c.
Aluminium oxynitride
Pics cuz it happened.
I, for one, wanted to see pictures (why does no one ever think of the pictures??!). There are some here: https://www.thenews.com.pk/lat...
Sapphire is aluminum oxide, Al2O3. Oxides are not salts. It's a transparent ceramic.
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