Why Metallic Hydrogen is so important! [2020]
A Nature article published January 29, 2020 by French scientist Paul Loubeyre, claiming to have finally created metallic hydrogen is an important milestone for pressure physics research.
Metallic hydrogen was first theorized back in 1935, by Eugene Wigner and Dr. Hillard Bell Huntington.
Wigner and Huntington based their idea on what is called Bravais Lattice (Bráveis Láttice) which is, an infinite array of discrete points generated by a set of discrete translation. Basically, it is a pattern that repeats itself throughout a structure, like graphene for instance.
They thought that this was true for any element including hydrogen and went on to calculate how this could happen. They concluded, based on a lot of calculation that hydrogen would assume a Bravais Lattice at around 25 GPa. Fast forward to today and that number may be closer to 425 GPa.
Scientists have given 85 years to the research of this topic but Why MH is so important?
Sources
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9569212/Silvera_Metallic.pdf
http://people.physics.illinois.edu/ceperley/papers/229.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys625.pdf
https://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.108.1175
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-scientists-superconducting-metal-hydrides.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02811-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1927-3
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/archive/l/lanthanum-decahydride.html
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