What is Metallic Hydrogen?

Metallic hydrogen is an electrical conductor that becomes liquid or solid hydrogen under high pressure of millions of atmospheres. Electrical conductivity is similar to metal, so it is called metal hydrogen. Metal hydrogen is a high-density, high-energy storage material. Previous predictions have shown that metal hydrogen is a room temperature superconductor.

Hydrogen is the most familiar chemical element. it is at

In 1935, British physicist

Theoretically, it is indeed possible to obtain metal hydrogen at ultra-high pressure. However, further research is needed to obtain metal hydrogen samples. Although metal hydrogen has not yet been obtained, theoretical workers have concluded that metal hydrogen is a high-temperature superconductor and a high-density, high-energy storage material.

Most of the superconducting materials that have been mastered need to be cooled under liquid helium (-269 ° C) or liquid nitrogen (-196 ° C), which limits the development of superconducting technology. Metal hydrogen

Why are people so painstakingly developing metal hydrogen? This is because once the introduction of metal hydrogen is like the birth of the steam engine, it will cause an epoch-making revolution in the entire field of science and technology.

Metal hydrogen is a metastable substance, which can be used to make a "magnetic cage" that constrains the plasma and "holds" the hot ionized gas.

In most common compounds, such as those in the visible ocean and soil around us, the molecules are

On January 26, 2017, Isaac Shivera's team wrote in the journal Science that they cooled the hydrogen samples to a temperature slightly above absolute zero and used them at extremely high pressures higher than the center of the earth. The diamond compresses the solid hydrogen and successfully obtains a small piece of metal hydrogen. This metal hydrogen sample is stored between two tiny diamonds.

"Preparing metal hydrogen is the holy grail of high-pressure physics, and this is the first metal hydrogen sample on earth," Isaac said in a press release issued by Harvard University.

On February 22, 2017, when Isaac Shivera's team tried to measure pressure with a low-power laser, they heard a faint "click", indicating that one of the diamonds had broken into dust. This catastrophic failure made the sample disappear. They believe that the metal hydrogen may disappear in the metal "pad" between the two diamonds, which is used to hold the metal hydrogen; or it may become a gas at normal temperature and pressure due to instability. But some scientists say that metal hydrogen may not have been developed at all.

Isaac said that through the microscope observation, the hydrogen samples were shiny and reflected light in the way that metal hydrogen does, which means that they produced metal hydrogen. But some scientists believe that it is far from clear whether the shiny metal they observed is hydrogen; others pointed out that this shiny metal may be alumina, because diamond is coated with alumina, and alumina is exposed to high pressure. There may also be different performance. To convince everyone, Isaac had to repeat the experiment in the same way. ^[3]