Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

by ars • 10 years ago

242 61 10 years ago

mrfusion4• 10 years ago

Did they test if it's super conducting?

They comment about this at the end of the paper: "As of the writing of this article we are maintaining the first sample of the first element in the form of solid metallic hydrogen at liquid nitrogen temperature in a cryostat. This valuable sample may survive warming to room temperature and the DAC could be extracted from the cryostat for greatly enhanced observation and further study. Another possibility is to cool to liquid helium temperatures and slowly release the load to see if SMH is metastable. An important future measurement is to study this metal for high temperature superconductivity."

michaelcampbell• 10 years ago

Out of curiosity, what made you ask this? Is there something about Hydrogen that would elicit such a question, or is that just a question that should be asked of any new material?

As I said, I'm genuinely curious. I'm not even an amateur here, but I wouldn't have thought to ask this at all.

raziel2702• 10 years ago

It's predicted to be a high temperature semiconductor.

rhubarbquid• 10 years ago

Metallic hydrogen was theorized to be a superconductor in a 1968 paper: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.21....

davesque• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen#Superconduct...

gpvos• 10 years ago

The article states that solid metallic hydrogen is hypothesized to be stable at room temperature and superconducting.

adrianratnapala3• 10 years ago

A high temperature superconductor at 500GPa is probably even less practical than a cryogenic superconductor.

So for this to be exciting we first need the even more exciting news that MH is metastable so that we can release the pressure. Then we can find out if we have a high temperature, high explosive, superconductor.

Even that is probably not of practical use. But by gum! It'd be fun.

mrfusion4• 10 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen

toufka• 10 years ago

Super cool stuff! There are some greatly quotable sentences in the paper:

Moreover, SMH (solid metal hydrogen) is predicted to be metastable so that it may exist at room temperature when the pressure is released. If so, and superconducting, it could have an important impact on mankind’s energy problems and would revolutionize rocketry as a powerful rocket propellant.
The principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH in a DAC (diamond anvil cell) has been failure of the diamonds.
The sample was cryogenically loaded at 15 K and included a grain of ruby for pressure determination.
As of the writing of this article we are maintaining the first sample of the first element in the form of solid metallic hydrogen at liquid nitrogen temperature in a cryostat.

mrfusion4• 10 years ago

If it's stable at room temperature wouldn't it make a really high density fuel too?

dogma11383• 10 years ago

Metallic Hydrogen can also be a liquid and even a gas, the metallic part indicates it's an electric conductor, not a solid. The "idea" behind metallic hydrogen is that since hydrogen is above the alkali metals in the periodic tables there should be a phase where it behaves like a metal, the state of the phase is not defined as a solid/gas/liquid in fact in all honesty it would exist as all 3 and more.

The first production of metallic oxygen was a liquid, this is the first solid one, tho at these pressures it's really unlikely that it would effective as fuel store. One of the more interesting parts about metallic hydrogen is the information we learn also applies to hydrides (hydrogen alloys) especially things like Lithium-Hydrogen since basically you can stabilize a large amount of hydrogen atoms (6 or more) around a single atom of Lithium, this might actually be very interesting for a lot of applications including energy storage. Hydrides should be considerably more stable and more importantly at considerably lower pressures which would mean that they can actually be used for various applications since you are not going to find something that only can exist at 400 gPA levels of pressure or higher very useful for high stress applications.

ArkyBeagle• 10 years ago

I'm no chemist, but I'd expect it to be more of an explosive than a fuel.

inimino• 10 years ago

From the paper:

"Moreover, SMH is predicted to be metastable so that it may exist at room temperature when the pressure is released (10). If so, and superconducting, it could have an important impact on mankind’s energy problems and would revolutionize rocketry as a powerful rocket propellant (11)."

oscrr• 10 years ago

I wonder what the specific impulse of the stuff would be.

wfunction• 10 years ago

Super cool stuff!

Literally!

Shivetya• 10 years ago

hell with rocket fuel, if the stuff isn't horribly expensive to produce it could be a good portable source period

amelius• 10 years ago

This makes me wonder, what is the energy density of this stuff? And how easily does it release its energy? (Is it hazardous?)

mrfusion4• 10 years ago

Guys, this is literally the holy grail of high pressure physics!

M_Grey• 10 years ago

Exciting stuff!! Everything from practical uses to insight into Jupiter's core could come from this.

rspeer• 10 years ago

What, like they made a cup out of it already?

StavrosK• 10 years ago

Yes. Well, except for the holes.

LeoPanthera• 10 years ago

"Now that is the cup of a high-pressure physicist."

marvin• 10 years ago

Wow, drinking from it causes eternal youth?

ddaygold• 10 years ago

One of my co-workers got his PhD with the lab/advisor that published his paper. He thought they weren't going to be able to synthesize it, so he left to be a quant.

I sent him an email saying 'hey, isn't this what your PhD was on?'. Then, I looked up his thesis and saw that this was his thesis and, but this publication was from his lab, with his advisor as co-author.

Oh man. I hope I didn't cause any existential dread. He didn't just make a decision that cost him a Nobel, right?

npunt2• 10 years ago

What'd he say?

npunt2• 10 years ago

Very exciting! For context, here's a nice long article (Aug 2016, 2 months before this arxiv paper came out) on the recent history of attempts to make it, with quotes from author of current paper and others in the field:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pressure-make-metallic-h...

A few months later, Silvera’s group squeezed hydrogen hard enough to make it nearly opaque, though not reflective — not quite a metal. “We think we’re just below the pressure that you need to make metallic hydrogen,” Silvera says. His findings are consistent with Eremets’ new phase, but Silvera disputes Eremets’ speculations of metallicity. “Every time they see something change they call it metallic,” Silvera says. “But they don’t really have evidence of metallic hydrogen.”
All this back and forth may seem chaotic, but it’s also a sign of a swiftly progressing field, the researchers say. “I think it’s very healthy competition,” Gregoryanz says. “When you realize that somebody is getting ahead of you, you work hard.”

InDemoVeritas• 10 years ago

I saw it! A tiny, shiny speck under the microscope, and the thrill of seeing a form of matter which, it can be argued, has never existed anywhere in the universe. Ever.

mmastrac• 10 years ago

Would the pressures in a Jovian not be enough to form metallic hydrogen?

zeristor• 10 years ago

By Jove?!

JoshTriplett• 10 years ago

To get solid metallic hydrogen, you'd need both high pressure and low temperatures; in the celestial bodies that can provide the former, the latter seems unlikely.

sixbrx2• 10 years ago

Jupiter is indeed believed to have a liquid metallic hydrogen core, which is the source of its enormous magnetic field:

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/0...

eevilspock• 10 years ago

That not only assumes it could never happen naturally, but also that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.

The aliens working undercover among us now are rolling their 7 photoreceptors at our anthropocentrism.

colordrops• 10 years ago

I'm being pedantic, but should be "human knowledge", not "universe". It is absurdly unlikely that the conditions needed for this substance to exist never occurred in the ~1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 star systems in the known universe. "conditions needed" includes intelligent life creating these substances.

Pyxl101• 10 years ago

Are you assuming there's no other intelligent life in the universe? :-)

fratlas• 10 years ago

Someone with a chem/physics background, could you please explain why metallic hydrogen is only theorized to be a superconductor? Is such a property not predictable?

sidek• 10 years ago

The problem (not having a condensed matter background, so my answer might not be entirely right) is that we can't solve the Schrödinger equation exactly for many-atom systems.

So we need to approximate our solutions to be able to get a good idea of what properties a material will have. Our approximations are pretty good and we have a decent idea of when some things superconductor. But our theories of superconduction aren't yet perfect, and sometimes the approximations can fail//generate behavior unexpected by our theories.

selimthegrim• 10 years ago

In general, we can only predict ground state properties with accuracy. Properly predicting high temperature superconductivity requires generating information about the Fermi surface that is not just a matter of ground states. If this is standard BCS model stuff then you might be able to get away with some rules of thumb.

resist_futility• 10 years ago

Just for reference the pressure at the center of the Earth is estimated to be around 360 GPa, while they are using 495 GPa and DACs able to reach over 700 GPa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell

graeham• 10 years ago

An absolutely silly pressure! For those who might not be familiar, standard steels fail at about 0.5 GPa

sixbrx2• 10 years ago

Jupiter, however is up to the task :)

Liquid Metallic hydrogen in Jupiter's core: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/0...

twic• 10 years ago

We used type IIac conic synthetic diamonds (supplied by Almax Easy-Lab) with ~30 micron diameter culet flats. About 5 microns were etched off of the diamond culets using the technique of reactive ion etching, to remove defects from the surface. The diamonds were then vacuum annealed at high temperature to remove residual stress. Alumina is known to act as a diffusion barrier against hydrogen. The diamonds, with the mounted rhenium gasket, were coated with a 50 nm thick layer of amorphous alumina by the process of atomic layer deposition.

Incredible technology!

The pressure was initially determined to ~88 GPa by ruby fluorescence using the scale of Chijioke et al (20); the exciting laser power was limited to a few mW. At higher pressures we measured the IR vibron absorption peaks of hydrogen with a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer with a thermal IR source, using the known pressure dependence of the IR vibron peaks for pressure determination (see SM).

Just incredible!

Photos were taken with a smartphone camera at the ocular of a modified stereo microscope

...

thom• 10 years ago

Rare that I lough out loud at Hacker News.

NikhilVerma• 10 years ago

Photos were taken with a smartphone camera at the ocular of a modified stereo microscope

Still incredible! We as people tend to underestimate just how "magical" our mobile phones are.

dr_zoidberg• 10 years ago

Considering the expensive equipment and processes, it's a wonder why they didn't use any scientific-grade CCD sensor.

vanderZwan• 10 years ago

Drives home the "more computing power than the Apollo program" bit of trivia, doesn't it?

simonhamp• 10 years ago

495GPa... doesn't seem so bad...

Standard atmospheric pressure ~= 100Pa

So they increased the pressure in that chamber by 4.95billion times.

And then they hypothesise that the hydrogen metal could be stable at room temperature.

Oh. My. Days.

davidhowlett• 10 years ago

Standard atmospheric pressure is ~= 100kPa

Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

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