| NDTV | - |
| NDTV | - |
US
scientists have succeeded in squeezing hydrogen so intensely that it
has turned into a metal, creating an entirely new material that might be
used as a highly efficient electricity conductor at room temperatures.
Abstract
Producing
metallic hydrogen has been a great challenge to condensed matter
physics. Metallic hydrogen may be a room temperature superconductor and
metastable when the pressure is released and could have an important
impact on energy and rocketry. We have studied solid molecular hydrogen
under pressure at low temperatures. At a pressure of 495 GPa hydrogen
becomes metallic with reflectivity as high as 0.91. We fit the
reflectance using a Drude free electron model to determine the plasma
frequency of 32.5 ± 2.1 eV at T = 5.5 K, with a corresponding electron carrier density of 7.7 ± 1.1 × 1023 particles/cm3,
consistent with theoretical estimates of the atomic density. The
properties are those of an atomic metal. We have produced the
Wigner-Huntington dissociative transition to atomic metallic hydrogen in
the laboratory.
Observation of the Wigner-Huntington transition to metallic hydrogen | Science
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