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Earth Science Technology

Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest (arstechnica.com) 334

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.
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Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest

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  • Use it to power our cellphones?

    • Forget the cell phone, I'm ready for some transparent aluminum or plasteel.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @11:59PM (#53746783)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by WarJolt ( 990309 )

          You do realize that every time scientists mess with hydrogen things tend to go boom? These hairless apes just made another way to blow things up.

          • by jitterman ( 987991 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @09:46AM (#53748161)
            Where was the "kaboom?" There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering "kaboom!"
        • My only question is: At what point do the protons fuse into one nucleus to form some rather delightful helium-2? I presume that is the motivation for all this of course, so that we can make some killer party balloons.

          • by Sique ( 173459 )
            If two protons fuse, they also capture an electron and turn into Deuterium, an heavy isotope of Hydrogen. No Helium-2, rather Hydrogen-2.
            • Re: Now can we (Score:2, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Number of protons determines the element. "The nucleus of deuterium, called a deuteron, contains one proton and one neutron, whereas the far more common hydrogen isotope, protium, has no neutron in the nucleus."

      • Re:Now can we (Score:5, Informative)

        by meerling ( 1487879 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @12:50AM (#53746901)
        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.
      • What about metallic diamonds? How much pressure does that take?
    • Re:Now can we (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @12:22AM (#53746833)

      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.

      • I'm pretty sure the jovian speculations are before they found out the extreme pressure requirements for it.
        I know jupiter is under a lot of pressure, but is it really up to 495 gigapascals?
        I looked that up, and apparently the core can get up to maybe 4,500 gigapascals, which is high enough, but they'll still have to rewrite the estimates of what the layers are, since they think it transitioned to metallic at about 200 gigapascals, which we now know isn't even half the required pressure.
        • by Sique ( 173459 )
          I'm pretty sure, it's actually the reverse. Metallic Hydrogen was theoretized to exist in 1935, and the idea that Jupiter's core could be metallic hydrogen was first published in the 1970ies, when data from the Pioneer 10 mission was being evaluated.
      • by Ihlosi ( 895663 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @04:41AM (#53747273)
        It has been theorized to be a room temp superconductor.

        I can see it now.

        "Gentlemen, I present to you a room temperature superconductor!"
        ...
        "What? No one said anything about ambient pressure."

  • Who's hull is described as "an element not found on earth"

    / particular pet peeve of mine
    // elements are elements
    /// except maybe that "island of stability"
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2017 @10:51PM (#53746541)

    Done 20 years ago in a gas gun:
    http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/26/science/big-gun-makes-hydrogen-into-a-metal.html

  • Awesome story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lotana ( 842533 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @11:01PM (#53746573)

    More stories like this one please!

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2017 @11:12PM (#53746615)

    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 ?

     

  • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Thursday January 26, 2017 @11:46PM (#53746745) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

      Hydrogen was first solidified in 1899. It wasn't a metal.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @12:24AM (#53746839)

    The Hindenburg disaster happened on May 6, 1937, almost exactly 80 years go. Have you seen the pictures? If you saw it going down in flames, you can't tell me that it wouldn't be the most metal thing you've ever seen. ;)

  • ... and that, as we all know... is transparent aluminum.

  • Extreme bling just got a lot lighter!!!!

  • Pictures (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tomahawk ( 1343 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @03:44AM (#53747183) Homepage

    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... [thenews.com.pk]

  • by taylorius ( 221419 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @03:56AM (#53747203) Homepage

    A spokesman for hydrogen said earlier - "There. HAPPY NOW?"

  • That is the best thing ever happened to me. Love you, Ars Technica.

  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Friday January 27, 2017 @10:47AM (#53748507)
    There are a number of issues with this paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pa... [arxiv.org] . The first is that the achieved pressure beyond 335 GPa are seat-of-the-pants estimates. The second is that they did not publish the mass of the "grain of ruby" and they did not account for what happened to this grain of ruby during the experiment. A one-atom layer of Al and Cr from the Al2:O3:Cr Ruby on the outside of their compressed 30 micron in diameter mass could account for their physical observations. My largest issue with the paper is they did not describe the depressurizing process. Metastability is a key indicator of metallic hydrogen and yet the paper omits any good or bad observations related to metastability. What happened at the end of the experiment? Why wasn't this reported?
  • Other physicists have expressed skepticism over the Harvard group's claims of making metallic hydrogen. Importantly, the claim is made on the basis of one single experiment that has not yet been replicated by the group reporting the claims. From a news article published in Nature [nature.com]:

    Other researchers aren't convinced. It’s far from clear that the shiny material the researchers see is actually hydrogen, says geophysicist Alexander Goncharov of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. Goncharov has criticized the Silvera lab’s methods before. He suggests that the shiny material may be alumina (aluminium oxide), which coats the tips of the diamonds in the anvil, and may behave differently under pressure.

    Loubeyre and others think that Silvera and Dias are overestimating the pressure that they reached, by relying on an imprecise calibration between turns of the screw and pressure inside the anvil. Eugene Gregoryanz, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, adds that part of the problem is that the researchers took only a single detailed measurement of their sample at the highest pressure — making it hard to see how pressure shifted during the experiment.

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