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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.
Fundamental research is never fruitless.
I'm gonna go with "if the half life of the element is less than a second, it makes less than optimal hull material" Then again I write device drivers, not spacecraft hulls, so I could be wrong.
Here's Wikipedia's take on the issue:
Basic research generates new ideas, principles, and theories, which may not be immediately utilized but nonetheless form the basis of progress and development in different fields. Today's computers, for example, could not exist without research in pure mathematics conducted over a century ago, for which there was no known practical application at the time. Basic research rarely helps practitioners directly with their everyday concerns; nevertheless, it stimulates new ways of thinking that have the potential to revolutionize and dramatically improve how practitioners deal with a problem in the future.[5]
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
More stories like this one please!
This. Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
Fucking bad ass. This just strikes me as awesome. It's theoretical science made real. It's like a scientific profession of faith in reason made physical.
Questions abound!
Would the metal transition back to gas at one atmosphere? Would low temperatures retard the transition? Does it act as a superconductor? Is there any speculation on why the diamond destabilizes at a greater frequency under laser illumination? What likely metallurgical properties is it likely to exhibit? Is it likely we'll be able to take advantage of any of them at room temp / one atmosphere ?
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.
In high school, I asked my grade 13 chemistry teacher why Hydrogen was on the left column of the periodic table where everything else was a metal. I was told because it had one electron in the outer shell, like everything else in that column.
The conversation went something like "But, if everything else in the column is a metal, doesn't that imply Hydrogen is a metal?" "No, it's a gas." "But hydrogen can be cooled to a liquid and it behaves like other liquefied metals (ie Mercury), couldn't it be cooled to the point where it is solid and will it behave like a metal?" "Go away."
In university, I asked the same question and was told that my reasoning was not unique and the idea was put forward many years before but that we'll probably never produce the necessary conditions on earth where Hydrogen will be a solid and we can see if it will be a metal.
Nice to see that we've done something that was thought to be, if not impossible, extremely difficult.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Lets take a moment to remember we only thought this to occur in the centers of gas giants, in space, quite a bit far out there. We have just replicated this on this planet. Of all the posibilities for things to happen, this one is pretty rare. I feel proud to be a hairless monkey today.
I am a condensed matter physicist.
There are no practical applications of metallic hydrogen in the foreseeable future. There is an "always be selling" philosophy in science for the last few decades which is really unfortunate and has not been healthy for public trust of science. Many people have been sold on applications for metallic hydrogen that are not realistic.
Was this a waste of time? No. The fundamental theories of how metals are structured and how conductivity works say that hydrogen should be a great metal. The historic difficulty in creating metallic hydrogen may have meant that we were missing something important about how metals form, or missing something important about hydrogen (we discovered we were missing a lot of the necessary physics over the course of 80 years). The observation of metallic hydrogen now is an important verification of the level of completeness of our understanding of matter.
Spending 80 years to work something out is not so unusual in physics. Difficult projects take a few generations.
Use it to power our cellphones?
Unlikely. But metallic hydrogen may have some very useful properties. It has been theorized to be a room temp superconductor. According to TFA, they haven't been able to test that yet.
Another factoid about SMH: It is believed to make up much of the mass of Jupiter, with Jovian SMH possibly making up the mass of a few dozen earths.
We already have transparent aluminum, and have for a long time.
It's just in the past couple of years that they've developed a method to make large sheets of it.
A belief based on science. In other words, they haven't tested it yet, but the formula using current data indicates it may happen.
No faith required.
Hey, they've believed hydrogen would become metallic when exposed to enough pressure. It took a long time to test it, but guess what, it does! At around 495 gigapascals, a pressure we hadn't been able to do until just recently.
Aluminium oxynitride
Pics cuz it happened.
... this endeavor was not simply a colossal waste of time?
Here's one interesting way to think about it. As per the article, scientists had used observations and measurements to predict that metallic hydrogen would require either 25GPa or (later) 380 - 400GPa of pressure. We now know that the known lower bound is somewhere around 465GPa. With this result, we can refine the models used in the original predictions and find out where they failed, and correct them.
With such corrections in hand, we may be able to make other predictions about hydrogen (or perhaps about other elements) with much more accuracy; and you just can't ever know where that might lead. It could lead to new battery technologies. It could lead to a better understanding of star formation. Maybe it revolutionizes material science.
That's the great thing about discovery -- it's often incremental, and you never know where a result might take you. At the very least, we can correct the models that once caused scientists to predict that 25GPa of pressure would turn hydrogen into a metal; where that can take us is an exciting unknown. Sometimes it's less about actually creating metallic hydrogen as much as it is what you learned along the way that becomes useful later.
(I'd think at the very least what has been learned about preventing diamond fragility at high pressures counts as a potentially immediately useful result -- although again, how someone might be able to use this in the future is an exciting question)
Yaz
Neither of these are metals.
i agree. But the article states: "the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals".
The article does not state: "the sample turned reflective, a key feature unique to metals"
Freezing hydrogen may make it solid, but certainly not a metalFreezing hydrogen may make it solid, but certainly not a metal.
Why not? Metal is not a binary state of being where either you are or you are not. It sounds awfully exotic, but it is actually more common than most people realise. Take for example tin.
Tin as you know it is a metal. Shiny, conductive of heat and electricity, alloys with other metals freely, etc. That is in fact beta tin. Tin has another form, alpha tin, which is dull and insulating and decidedly nonmetallic. This form is the most stable below about 13 degrees C in pure tin. What's more, it's autocatalytic and will cause beta tin to transform to alpha tin. It also takes up more space, so the transformation is destructive and known as "tin pest". It has destroyed numerous things over the course of history.
If you like (I recommend it), you can watch time lapse videos on youtube where a solid block of metal tin turns to grey powder over the course of hours when cooled to a quite low temperature.
If you go look at the periodic table, there's a diagonal line which separates non metals from metals. Everything near the line does not behave entirely in ways that one might consider a metal to behave. Aluminium for example, is not quite such a metallic metal as you might think. It's pretty metallic, but in some ways behaves in distinctly nonmetallic ways. Tin is near the line. Hydrogen is on it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If anything we step back and debate problems more than necessary. You can easily spend a career in physics identifying a single "difficulty" and putting together a plan for the next generation to tackle it.
I'm a third generation nanotechnologist. The guys 40+ years ago mapped out what they thought could be done (they were horribly wrong, but they were good guesses), and they developed the laboratory tools we needed just to look at the stuff (that didn't exist yet). This was hard, some of them won Nobel prizes for their work. The guys 20-30 years ago got some of the proof of concept work done by inventing new materials (in the end, not the right materials, but very close). This was also hard; some of them won Nobel prizes. I got to work on the very first applications with the right tools and the right materials. This was a lot easier; none of my generation is going to win anything. The people I trained get to do engineering and work on products. They can do in a day what took me a year, and what my mentor could just write about theoretically.
Still, we're very far away from the end of the road.
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...
A spokesman for hydrogen said earlier - "There. HAPPY NOW?"
I can see it now.
"Gentlemen, I present to you a room temperature superconductor!"
...
"What? No one said anything about ambient pressure."
when you combine two protons, and convert one to a neutron via election capture, how many protons do you have left?
If you're dealing with election capture you have zero protons but at least one Trump.
Sapphire is aluminum oxide, Al2O3. Oxides are not salts. It's a transparent ceramic.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Researchers in Fairbanks, Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a room temperature superconductor.
Where was the "kaboom?" There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering "kaboom!"
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Carbon is a metal.
No it ain't. It is sometimes considered a metalloid, but I've never heard it considered to be a metal.
it is opaque
Er, well, diamond isn't, nor is lonsdaleite.
and shiny
Graphite is only a bit. Fullerenes certainly aren't. Diamond is, as is glassy carbon and londsdaleite.
Are you going to claim that diamond is not a metal
Yes. Elements can be both metals and nonmetals. Tin for example is usually a metal, with all the expected properties (shiny, condctive of heat and electricity, ductile), but if the tin pest strikes you end up with nonmetallic tin which is dull, brittle and insulating.
Very few things in science fit into nearly deeined boxes. Metallicness is one of those.
SJW n. One who posts facts.