Never-before-seen “black nitrogen” plugs puzzle in periodic table

https://newatlas.com/materials/black-nitrogen-allotrope-periodic-table/

by sahin • 6 years ago

358 121 6 years ago

newatlas.com

aaronlifshin• 6 years ago

The name reminds me of Big Bismuth!

JulianMorrison• 6 years ago

'Tis but a flesh wound!

klyrs• 6 years ago

To create the new form [nitrogen] was pressed together between two diamonds to 1.4 million atmospheres of pressure, and over 4,000 °C (7,232 °F)... It appears to have good conductivity, much like that of graphene, which could make it useful in future electronic devices.

Are you kidding me? Kinda grasping at straws if that's the application -- who are we selling these electronics to, magma golems? This is good & pure science, please don't sully it with such foolishness.

sillysaurusx2• 6 years ago

Science journalists are pretty much required to ask about useful applications. "It was cool and we wanted to do it" may be the truth, but (sadly) it's not an acceptable answer.

dylan604• 6 years ago

When did "for science" loose it's practical meaning and become a meme? At this point, "for science" is next to "hold my beer".

cyclotron3k• 6 years ago

Totally agree.

Scientific breakthroughs shouldn't require commercial justification. That they are expanding the extent of human knowledge should be enough.

nikanj• 6 years ago

Everyone knows you can't report on science without promising cellphones that you only have to charge once per week.

virgilp• 6 years ago

So, basically, Nokia 3310?

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

If it can be done with pressure alone, it isn't unreasonable to consider that a crystalline structure might be able to keep it in this state with no external forces.

lain-dono• 6 years ago

magma golems

I don't understand, why not? If they're magma, it doesn't mean they're not smart enough to use electronics.

sillysaurusx2• 6 years ago

What are some other open mysteries in physics / chemistry / science? Anyone have some favorites?

Bonus points for simplicity + obscurity. Everyone knows that dark matter is an open mystery, but I suspect not too many people knew about black nitrogen.

EDIT: There are some nice lists on Wikipedia that are fun to dig through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems

Is Feynmanium the last chemical element that can physically exist? That is, what are the chemical consequences of having an element with an atomic number above 137, whose 1s electrons must travel faster than the speed of light? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table#Elemen...

mkaic• 6 years ago

Those links are excellent reading, thank you for posting them here!

macintux• 6 years ago

Nice find. The Axis of Evil is particularly interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology)

mardifoufs• 6 years ago

Woah, what a rabbit hole that wiki article got me into. Btw, what could be the possible explanation for that "axis of evil" if we assume it's not just a series of faulty observations?

adam_cadien• 6 years ago

How do glasses form? What order parameter determines the properties of liquids? Are there an unifying properties determining the structure of atomic liquids? What determines the network properties of liquids?

Here's a more tangible one; Is solid hydrogen stable?

I did my PhD in this area and even discovered liquid polymorphism in atomic Cerium.

There are tons of unanswered questions like this! It's bonkers how many things we know we don't know, just think of the things we don't know we don't know :p

tsomctl• 6 years ago

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. - Rumsfeld

cinquemb• 6 years ago

How do glasses form?

Reminds me of cool paper (i think) from one folks I worked with describes in the abstract[0]:

"We describe numerical simulations and analyses of a quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) model of glassy dynamics. In this model, hard rods undergo Brownian dynamics through a series of narrow channels connected by J intersections. We do not allow the rods to turn at the intersections, and thus there is a single, continuous route through the system. This Q1D model displays caging behavior, collective particle rearrangements, and rapid growth of the structural relaxation time, which are also found in supercooled liquids and glasses. The mean-square displacement Σ(t) for this Q1D model displays several dynamical regimes: 1) short-time diffusion Σ(t)∼t, 2) a plateau in the mean-square displacement caused by caging behavior, 3) single-file diffusion characterized by anomalous scaling Σ(t)∼t0.5 at intermediate times, and 4) a crossover to long-time diffusion Σ(t)∼t for times t that grow with the complexity of the circuit. We develop a general procedure for determining the structural relaxation time tD, beyond which the system undergoes long-time diffusion, as a function of the packing fraction ϕ and system topology. This procedure involves several steps: 1) define a set of distinct microstates in configuration space of the system, 2) construct a directed network of microstates and transitions between them, 3) identify minimal, closed loops in the network that give rise to structural relaxation, 4) determine the frequencies of `bottleneck' microstates that control the slow dynamics and time required to transition out of them, and 5) use the microstate frequencies and lifetimes to deduce tD(ϕ). We find that tD obeys power-law scaling, tD∼(ϕ∗−ϕ)−α, where both ϕ∗ (signaling complete kinetic arrest) and α>0 depend on the system topology. "

But yeah, so much amazing things out there, I could read and think about stuff forever lol

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0960

ecoled_ame• 6 years ago

literally every person’s phd project contains mysteries ..

brigandish• 6 years ago

The main one being how late they left it to begin writing and how they managed to finish it with so little sleep.

Nition• 6 years ago

The search for a non-toxic, non-animal-based chemically stable red colour.

schoen2• 6 years ago

People who aren't vegetarians, fans of Berton Roueché, or both, might not know the origin of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine!

Iv• 6 years ago

Why are some materials able to conduct heat or electricity but not the other?

phonethrowaway• 6 years ago

enjoy. https://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm

hvidgaard• 6 years ago

Is Feynmanium the last chemical element that can physically exist? That is, what are the chemical consequences of having an element with an atomic number above 137, whose 1s electrons must travel faster than the speed of light?

Just a nitpick, electrons do not travel - they simply exist as a quantum phenomena, with a probability of existing in certain places. That said, as your link also explains, when we take the electron energy into consideration, it seems like there is a limit for "regular" atoms, but beyond that they may simply exhibit weird quantum mechanics. We have no idea.

Ma8ee• 6 years ago

Of course they travel, or at least they have a wave function in momentum space which makes it possible to calculate the probability that we will find it at a certain point further away at a later time.

And we have very good ideas. Quantum Mechanics is not something mysteriously handwaving mumbo jumbo. It is used every day to make very precise predictions.

atdt• 6 years ago

Exactly how charge is separated in a cloud to cause lightning.

teekert• 6 years ago

Too lazy to find references but I have seen talk where people melt materials, (the heat them far above glass transition state), then cool them and they get the exact same configuration down to the molecular level, as if the were never liquid.

Boulth• 6 years ago

Whether the island o stability exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

dmos62• 6 years ago

I was watching a TED talk on the fourth phase of water [0] by Gerald Pollack where he said that we don't know why clouds form the way they do. Given the popular theories, the vapour particles should distribute evenly across the sky. In part, the talk is about how little we actually know about water.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-T7tCMUDXU

mannykannot• 6 years ago

“The dirty secret of supernovae is that in the computer models, we can’t ever actually get them to do the final ignition. There always has to be an injected trigger,” says Ashley Pagnotta at College of Charleston in South Carolina.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2226326-black-holes-for...

With regard to the superluminal electrons above atomic number 137, it is apparently only a consequence of using a non-relativistic approximation. That apparently leaves the somewhat related issue of an imaginary ground state energy intact, though at a higher atomic number. Nice find!

h2odragon• 6 years ago

the team exposed nitrogen to extreme heat and pressure. It was pressed together between two diamonds to 1.4 million atmospheres of pressure, and over 4,000 °C (7,232 °F).
The temperature at the inner core's surface is estimated to be approximately 5700 K (5430 °C or 9806 °F) ... The pressure in the Earth's inner core is slightly higher than it is at the boundary between the outer and inner cores: it ranges from about 330 to 360 gigapascals (3,300,000 to 3,600,000 atm)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_inner_core

There's probably even weirder states of nitrogen and other elements not that far away from us. Whole chemistries and semiconductor-ish effects we're guessing at. Fun!

noir_lord• 6 years ago

This is why I love science, any field where “what happens if we squish it really really hard and then superheat it?” is answered by “let’s find out” is one that has my admiration.

Scientists the world over have my respect for what they do.

hpkuarg• 6 years ago

"Science isn't about why, it's about why not!"

partomniscient• 6 years ago

Indeed. This is way past the 'what happens if you put it in the microwave?' level of scientific enquiry, but yet it also has the same kind of feel to it in some way.

thelibrarian• 6 years ago

Being previously unfamiliar both with the black phosphorus allotrope, and with newatlas.com, I clicked on the link wondering if this would be the new “red mercury”. I was pleasantly surprised that it is much more interesting (and scientifically valid) than that.

colanderman2• 6 years ago

Dumb question, how does one convince nitrogen, a gas, to sit still between the heads of those two diamonds to be compressed?

divbzero• 6 years ago

They employed either a very persuasive graduate student, or a chamber filled with pure nitrogen.

From the experimental method section of the original paper: [1]

“A BX90-type diamond anvil cell equipped with 80 μm diameter diamond anvil culets was prepared. A 200 μm thick rhenium foil was indented down to 12 μm and a sample cavity of 40 μm in diameter was laser-drilled at the center of the indentation. Two agglomerates of submicron-sized gold particles, each of approximately 2 μm in size, were loaded into the sample chamber to serve as both YAG laser absorbers and pressure gauges. The cell was then loaded with pure nitrogen gas at ~1200 bars.”

[1] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...

colanderman2• 6 years ago

Ah thanks, if I'm understanding that correctly it sounds like the rhenium foil contained the nitrogen as it was being compressed. That makes sense.

revicon• 6 years ago

Here's what a BX90-type diamond anvil cell looks like...

https://aip.scitation.org/action/showOpenGraphArticleImage?d...

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

either a very persuasive graduate student

LOL. This was smart and funny.

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

The significance of this article is that you don't need a big science lab like CERN to do useful experiments.

Diamond anvil cells are under $10,000:

https://diamondanvils.com/product-category/diamond-anvil-cel...

airstrike• 6 years ago

you don't need a big science lab like CERN to do useful experiments

Did anyone really ever claim that?

Zensynthium• 6 years ago

No, but that's still pretty cool to hear (even though everything else to conduct the experiment was probably a bit pricier if not just as pricey)

hobofan• 6 years ago

And how cheaply can you create a environment of "1.4 million atmospheres of pressure, and over 4,000 °C"?

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

A diamond anvil makes both of those on the tips of the diamond (briefly)

ryder9• 6 years ago

so you don't know what CERN is? ok

B5C8ECB24DB47D12• 6 years ago

While your first statement is true, in this specific case, you actually need a "big science lab":

* lasers used to heat up the sample (at least a few 10k$), * the actual X-ray source (i.e. a synchrotron, which costs hundreds of millions to build and millions annually to run, albeit for thousands of experiments a year), * surrounding instruments (such as X-ray detector for diffraction and spectrometer+camera for temperature measurements) * people who actually makes things work

This kind of experiment is far from being cheap technically speaking. However, access to beamtime at such state-run X-ray facilities (CERN job's is not to produce X-rays) is often free of charge, at least for academia (or as long as you publish your results). You "only" have to apply for beamtime.

moneytide12• 6 years ago

Metallic hydrogen is thought to be possible using the diamond stamping method mentioned in the article.

foobarbecue• 6 years ago

Yeah, they made a shiny thing one time... But it got away

mturmon• 6 years ago

More on the metallic hydrogen investigations: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/metallic-hydrogen...

It appears that one can use lasers, diamond vises, and/or numerical simulation to get properties of metallic hydrogen.

moneytide12• 6 years ago

I have only read a few short articles about it, but after it is compressed to a certain point, can it remain in the metallic state after the vise/laser is removed?

itsangaris• 6 years ago

Can anyone more specifically comment on some of the potential applications for this newly discovered material?

duskwuff3• 6 years ago

None, at least not directly. It's an allotrope which can only exist under extreme physical conditions.

There are many such allotropes of well-known substances. For instance, solid water has over a dozen allotropes (including ice-IX, or "ice-nine", which will not turn you into a human popsicle). Most of the interesting allotropes of ice only form under pressures of >100 MPa, so they are never seen under terrestrial conditions. The same applies to most other allotropes, with a few notable exceptions in metals and metalloids (like tin and sulphur).

It's unclear to me what the author of the article had in mind when they suggested the "potential" that "black nitrogen might have for electronics". Unless the author is imagining electronics which must be placed under immense pressure and heated to thousands of degrees to remain stable?

air7• 6 years ago

There's always the possibility that a method will be found that will allow the material to maintain at least some of these properties after "returning" to normal temp/pressures conditions.

kaliszad• 6 years ago

I was told, that at nanoscale high pressures in the gigapascal range are attainable somewhat easily by a friend of mine working here: https://tu-dresden.de/ing/elektrotechnik/ihm/NEM/die-profess... so maybe this form of nitrogen could be in special nano-islands or something like that. I guess, it is important to understand the physics of the materials to a certain degree and then think about engineering. This research is clearly at the beginning of the first phase, so they maybe found some interesting properties that could be useful in electronics but that's about it.

a3n• 6 years ago

My ignorant guess: During a manufacturing process?

vsareto• 6 years ago

If it has good conductivity, they probably just write in "potential for electronics" out of habit or reflex. It's probably good for science fiction writers to be able to find this stuff.

nearbuy• 6 years ago

This actually bugs me about articles on new discoveries: they almost always try to talk about potential applications, no matter how far-fetched they are. Sometimes the most honest answer is that we currently don't know any potential applications.

In this case, we have something that may be similar to graphene, but can only exist at 4000°C and 1.4 million atmospheres. Graphene is interesting for electronics, so they suggest black nitrogen might be useful for electronics too. But of course graphene has the slight advantage that it's relatively easy to produce and doesn't dissolve at temperatures lower than the surface of a star.

elbear• 6 years ago

I love the sense of humor found in the comments of this thread.

hathym• 6 years ago

could one day be useful in advanced electronics

We're still waiting for graphene.

dredmorbius3• 6 years ago

So, when someone mentions nitrogen, high temperatures, and high pressures, in the same sentence, what comes to my mind isn't electronics so much as explosives.

arrosenberg• 6 years ago

Pure nitrogen forms a dimer and is inert. The nitrogen that goes boom involves hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

duskwuff3• 6 years ago

And "going boom" typically involves those nitrogen atoms setting off on their own to turn back into N2.

dredmorbius3• 6 years ago

Allotropes aren't "pure" (STP) molecular N2.

This allotrope seems to be the sort of thing that would be (or could be) formed in a sufficiently powerful, or engineered, explosion. How or to what ends ... I'm not sure.

SAI_Peregrinus• 6 years ago

Not quite. Pure nitrogen forms an inert dimer with a very strong bond. The nitrogen that goes boom is the energy released by forming such a bond when you liberate nitrogen from complexes with other things than single nitrogen atoms. Like hydrogen and carbon and maybe oxygen.

But this stuff in the article is pure nitrogen, and isn't a dimer, and certainly isn't inert (it decayed back to the dimer when pressure was released). It'd be a crappy explosive (needs to be kept in a diamond anvil cell...) but it would have released the energy used to form it. In theory there are other allotropes, like octaazacubane (N8) that might be more stable and would be frighteningly efficient explosives.

joelthelion• 6 years ago

Dumb question: with all we know about theoretical quantum physics, couldn't we compute what happens in these extreme conditions? Or is it still computationally intractable? If so, why is that?

GuB-42• 6 years ago

I am not a quantum physicist by far, but my understanding is that solving the Schrodinger equation for anything more complex than hydrogen is more or less impossible.

So instead we go the other way: use "close enough" experimental data and perturbation theory to approximate the results for more complex systems.

Xcelerate• 6 years ago

solving the Schrodinger equation for anything more complex than hydrogen is more or less impossible.

Solving in the sense of an analytic, closed form solution to the non-relativistic Schrodinger equation (itself an approximation to QFT) using commonly accepted elementary functions. Even this requires actually evaluating the elementary functions to some degree of numerical accuracy if you want digits.

I often see this claim that only hydrogen is solvable, but I find it misleading. We have algorithms that will give solutions to the non-relativistic Schrodinger equation for helium to whatever degree of decimal precision you like (see FCI QMC methods) — how long these algorithms take to run is a different matter (see the fermion sign problem), but for helium it’s not too bad. The algorithms are unbiased, which I consider to be an exact solution.

You can think of it in the same way that we have Monte Carlo solutions to the rendering equation for global illumination. They are not closed form in terms of arbitrary elementary functions, but they converge to the exact solution over time.

danharaj• 6 years ago

Only hydrogen has an analytic solution. Even helium requires approximations because the electrons interact. Approximation requires an understanding of the structure of the wavefunction which gets increasingly complex as we add more particles to the system that interact and entangle with one another like electrons in an atom do. Even further, that's for single atoms that aren't interacting strongly with their environment. Here we're talking about an ensemble of nitrogen atoms interacting with each other in a somewhat extreme environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartree%E2%80%93Fock_method

goalieca• 6 years ago

All of the cool computer science problems are in the other sciences. This one in particular looks like a challenging engineering problem to scale up.

tim333• 6 years ago

This is one of the things that makes me think we are not living in a computer simulation - the physics is really hard to simulate. Unless the simulation is just fooling us to think that ;)

evanb• 6 years ago

I _am_ a computational physicist. The main problem I'm interested in is of a slightly different nature: just compute properties of protons, neutrons, and light nuclei from QCD, the theory of quarks and gluons. However, because the "operating system" of quantum mechanics is the same, many of the computational difficulties are shared.

I described the method we use and some of the computational difficulties in some previous threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15780514

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048170

But, if you're comfortable with an argument from authority, suffice it to say that much of the computational power in the largest supercomputing centers all across the world are dedicated to quantum many-body problems.

If you want equilibrium properties at temperature T [non equilibrium properties, like real-time dynamics have additional exponentially-bad computational intractabilities, known as the sign problem], you want to evaluate a partition function

    Z = tr[ exp( - H / T ) ]

where H is the Hamiltonian that, given an eigenstate, has an the state's energy as the eigenvalue. The space H acts on grows exponentially with the number of particles in your simulation [simulations to determine crystal structures are typically in the canonical ensemble; if that doesn't mean anything to you, that's OK, but it's something you can read further on; basically it means: you try to take the number of particles to be large, rather than, for example, fix a density].

We have importance-sampling Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques for evaluating Z. For some problems it succeeds with flying colors, although demonstrating that you're in the thermodynamic [infinite number of particles and infinite volume] limit requires calculating at a variety of volumes and particle numbers, for extrapolation. If you just do random updates to your state vector, most updates will be rejected; use HMC to update the whole state at once [HMC = Hybrid Monte Carlo, or Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, if you're not a computational physicist, strangely].

This approach is not naively parallelizable, and the machines where HMC is performed requires extremely high-performance interconnects, think 10-100 times faster than what's available in a standard datacenter.

The method is inherently statistical: give me more computing time and I can shrink the error bars. But if the problem has certain technical difficulties (or is in real-time, for example, rather than equilibrium), you encounter the sign problem, where the partition function you want to evaluate now becomes

    Z = tr[ exp( i H / T ) ]

and you need an exponentially large sample to resolve the intricate cancellations that arise from summing just a bunch of phases.

radihuq• 6 years ago

This went way over my head but just wanted to thank you for taking the time to make this interesting post

foxyv• 6 years ago

Unfortunately the solutions for anything more than a single proton are non-linear. This means finding stable states for anything other than hydrogen is very hard computationally speaking. The problem can be compared to predicting weather patterns a month in advance.

Vysero• 6 years ago

This makes me wonder, are there are any other elements in the periodic table which seem to be missing their allotropes or was N the only one?

logfromblammo• 6 years ago

"the new substance is crystalline, occurs in two-dimensional sheets, and could one day be useful in advanced electronics."
"the material itself remains unstable and it quickly dissolves when the heat and pressure are relaxed."

So... advanced electronics that can only exist at 1.4 million atmospheres and 4000 degrees C? What are we building, here, computers that only work inside the sun?

By this insane standard, what material would not one day be useful in advanced electronics?

peter303• 6 years ago

Sounds like a new weapon for the next Star Trek or James Bond movie.

Never-before-seen “black nitrogen” plugs puzzle in periodic table

Related Stories