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January 29, 2017
Diamond vise turns hydrogen into a metal, potentially ending 80-year quest
Word got around, and the next morning there was a line. Throughout the day, hundreds filed in to peer through a benchtop microscope at a reddish silver dot trapped between two diamond tips. Silvera finally closed shop at 6 p.m. to go home. "It took weeks for the excitement to die down," Silvera says. That excitement swirled because by squeezing hydrogen to pressures well beyond those in the center of Earth, Silvera and his postdoc Ranga Dias had seen a hint that it had morphed into a solid metal, capable of conducting electricity. "If it's true it would be fantastic," says Reinhard Boehler, a physicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. "This is something we as a community have been pushing to see for decades." | Science | AAAS
Posted by gerardvanderleun at January 29, 2017 8:46 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.