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Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

arxiv.org

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Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#31

Post by JoshTriplett »

mmastrac wrote: post #16
InDemoVeritas wrote: post #14

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.

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

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.

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#32

Post by davesque »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #15
mrfusion wrote: post #2

Did they test if it's super conducting?

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.

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

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#33

Post by eevilspock »

InDemoVeritas wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#35

Post by colordrops »

InDemoVeritas wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#36

Post by sho »

zeristor wrote: post #21
mmastrac wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By Jove?!

Your attempt at humour has been rightly sanctioned, but you weren't all that far from the mark. Jove is another name for the roman god Jupiter, and as such a Jovian planet is one that resembles Jupiter - ie. large gas giants, where metallic hydrogen is certainly thought to exist in nature.

Not by Jove - inside Jove.

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#37

Post by wfunction »

toufka wrote: post #6

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 req…

> Super cool stuff!

Literally!

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#38

Post by Pyxl101 »

InDemoVeritas wrote: post #14

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.

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

Re: Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory

#40

Post by twic »

> 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

...

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