Scientists have just found a way to make metallic solid hydrogen in the lab, by
compressing it at ultrahigh pressure between two diamond anvils.
Credit: Ranga Dias; Isaac Silvera
Metallic hydrogen, a bizarre form of the element that conducts electricity even at low temperatures, has finally been made in the lab, 80 years after physicists predicted its existence.
Scientists managed to create the elusive, electrically conductive hydrogen by squeezing it to incredibly high pressures between two ultrapure diamonds, the researchers reported in a new study.
"No one has ever encountered metallic hydrogen because it's never existed on Earth before," Isaac Silvera, a condensed matter physicist at Harvard University, told Live Science. "Probably the conditions in the universe are such that it has never existed in the universe." https://www.livescience.com/57645-elusive-metallic-hydrogen-created.html
