The pressure is on to make metallic hydrogen

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
They are thinking "room temperature" superconductor with metalic hydrogen. Screw diamonds... use graphene.

As matter of fact, screw metallic hydrogen. Use purple bronze in that graphene press.

Purple bronze, you mean Hepatizon ?

a reply to: projectvxn
which research?

originally posted by: zinc12
a reply to: bobs_uruncle

Red mercury (actually more purple then red) is the stuff made in the Nazi torsion field devices die glocke. Torsion field radiation has strange influence on many substances for example it is possible to produce large quantity's of steel with virtually no carbon and no crystal structure.

I know about magnetics, I did a system like that for a forge. It's actually a modified version of my adiabatic reactor. In another application we permanently altered the resonant frequencies of dielectrics. However, red mercury, from my experience is a myth. When I worked for the military, I had access to things you wouldn't believe, I held the same clearance as the chief of CI and there was no red mercury.

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: bobs_uruncle

Red mercury is unstabilised mercury, it is highly radioactive and the Nazis made it by accident. The torsion field generator they were using used large quantity's of liquid mercury. During operation it was found the mercury became highly radioactive (weapons grade). It is called red because it was being manufactured in Russia. After the war the Americans and Russians both scrambled to pickup the Nazi Scientists. It was decided to officially declare red mercury a myth because it poses a massive security threat. It is not something we would want those Jihad nutters getting their hands on. It is made by adding a small quantity of radioactive material to liquid mercury before putting the mixture into a die glocke type generator. I would not be surprised if most of the nuclear warheads of the old USSR contained this material rather then weapons grade uranium or plutonium.

Torsion field radiation can unstabalise a heavy element making it radioactive but it can also do the reverse, hovering above a nuclear missile silo you can cause the radioactive warheads to decrease in radioactivity effectively making the missiles useless as weapons.

Superconductors can make engines smaller and more powerful. Room temperature superconductors would be easier to handle than superconductors that need to be cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperatures. Ceramic superconductors have had a lot of problems for applications because of brittleness and other issues.

Room temperature metal superconductors with very high critical current could make superstrong magnets. Powerful magnets could be used to solve challenges getting to commercial energy generation from nuclear fusion.

Nextbigvuture.com - If newly created metallic hydrogen stays stable when brought back to regular pressure as predicted by theory then eventually the world will radically change.

As magnetic field strength increases the ability to confine plasma scales to the fourth power. If the metallic hydrogen is used and it is room temperature then you solve half the problem to nuclear fusion right there! And if you put it in an engine you would drastically cut size and weight down which saves on fuel.

One of the scientists who created the lab samples thinks it would be an ideal rocket fuel. Looks like the guys at Next big future are really keen (thy have three stories up right now!) and are excited. I think everybody should here about this!




a reply to: zinc12

It was just what I was into when I posted! It has some of the properties of a superconductor already. Strange stuff also being investigated.

a reply to: zinc12

ed mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition purportedly used in the creation of nuclear bombs, as well as a variety of unrelated weapons systems. In reality, no such substance exists.

It is purported to be mercuric iodide, a poisonous, odorless, tasteless, water-insoluble scarlet-red powder that becomes yellow when heated above 126 °C, due to a thermochromatic change in crystalline structure.[1][2] However, samples of "red mercury" obtained from arrested would-be terrorists invariably consisted of nothing more than various red dyes or powders of little value, which may have been sold as part of a campaign intended to flush out potential nuclear smugglers.

The "red mercury" hoax was first reported in 1979, and was commonly discussed in the media in the 1990s. Prices as high as $1,800,000 per kilogram were reported.[3]

en.wikipedia.org...

To create it, Silvera and Dias squeezed a tiny hydrogen sample at 495 gigapascal, or more than 71.7 million pounds-per-square inch - greater than the pressure at the center of the Earth. At those extreme pressures, Silvera explained, solid molecular hydrogen -which consists of molecules on the lattice sites of the solid - breaks down, and the tightly bound molecules dissociate to transforms into atomic hydrogen, which is a metal.

...

"One prediction that's very important is metallic hydrogen is predicted to be meta-stable," Silvera said. "That means if you take the pressure off, it will stay metallic, similar to the way diamonds form from graphite under intense heat and pressure, but remains a diamond when that pressure and heat is removed."

Understanding whether the material is stable is important, Silvera said, because predictions suggest metallic hydrogen could act as a superconductor at room temperatures.

"That would be revolutionary," he said. "As much as 15 percent of energy is lost to dissipation during transmission, so if you could make wires from this material and use them in the electrical grid, it could change that story."

Phys.org, Jan. 26, 2017 - Metallic hydrogen, once theory, becomes reality.

Uh, reported that it was created by these guys in November of last year! Now the story has hit the press and everybody else is picking itup.

I was waiting patiently to see if their samples were meta stable. They said they were going to slowly raise the temperature on one of the samples. THAT news is why I searched the term only to see "scientists create metallic hydrogen"!! At least they have some numbers with the announcement. And another interesting tidbit...

"Diamonds are polished with diamond powder, and that can gouge out carbon from the surface," Silvera said. "When we looked at the diamond using atomic force microscopy, we found defects, which could cause it to weaken and break."

The solution, he said, was to use a reactive ion etching process to shave a tiny layer - just five microns thick, or about one-tenth of a human hair - from the diamond's surface. The diamonds were then coated with a thin layer of alumina to prevent the hydrogen from diffusing into their crystal structure and embrittling them.

(same source)

At those forces they would push the hydrogen into the diamonds! There are few more examples of what a room temperature superconductor can do at the article.

My question is, why did it take so long to announce this to the press? They announced this on twitter in Nov. 2016. WTH?! Keeping it secret? Wait until the new president comes in? Align with the other "master plans" or what ever?

They still have not announced if it is meta stable... and it is nearly February 2017.

It's gone

www.foxnews.com...

Scientists reportedly say that the world’s only sample of metallic hydrogen, which was touted as potentially revolutionizing technology, has disappeared.

Last month physicists at Harvard University achieved what they described as “the holy grail of high-pressure physics,” when they created the first metallic hydrogen material.

However, Science Alert reports that the sample has disappeared, much to the dismay of experts. The sample was stored at temperatures around -316 degrees Fahrenheit, the report said, noting that the metallic hydrogen was kept at high pressure between two diamonds in a vice-like device.

Earlier this month the vice failed when testing caused the diamonds to break, according to Science Alert, which says that scientists haven’t been able to find a trace of the metallic hydrogen.

“Basically, it’s disappeared,” Isaac Silvera, Harvard’s Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, who led the research, told Science Alert. “It’s either someplace at room pressure, very small, or it just turned back into a gas. We don’t know.”

not a good day for *SCIENCE*...

a reply to: projectvxn

Think there was some recent breakthrough/speculation as to the production of said substance but apparently the only sample has somewhat disappeared.

www.extremetech.com...

What's the point of having a room-temperature superconductor if you need to maintain jupiter-level atmospheric pressure to keep it stable?

It would be easier to have a superconductor near absolute zero in standard earth-level atmospheric pressure.

This whole exercise is pointless.

a reply to: peskyhumans

Metallic hydrogen may be "meta stable" at room temperature which is the whole reason everybody got excited. It would stay a metal at room temperature and normal pressure (what meta stable means).

The scientists were not sure if their samples were stable. So they kept the whole apparatus cold and under pressure to be sure. They where going to send the whole thing to another lab when the vice broke.

If metallic hydrogen was created it may be just be sitting there in the diamond crumbles!

Re-reading the skeptic response it seems that metallic hydrogen may NOT have been created after all. They had to coat the diamonds with aluminum (??) powder to keep the hydrogen from being pushed into the diamonds. They may have made a shiny ball of aluminum stuffed with liquid hydrogen.

I wonder if they can use sheets of graphene instead?

ETA: It is an experiment worth repeating because this would be world changing

cool

a reply to: ElGoobero

To conduct further tests, Silvera and his [Harvard] team were planning to ship the sample to the synchrotron at the Argonne National Laboratory [in Chicago]. Before they sent it off, they used the low-powered red laser to measure the pressure of the system once more.

But this time, the energy from the laser immediately destroyed the system, and caused one of the diamonds to disintegrate.

"As soon as we turned the light on, 'click', the diamonds broke. One of them catastrophically, it just became powder," explained Silvera.

Nextbigfutre.com, March 4, 2017 - Claimed solid metallic hydrogen sample was lost.

The laser was initially shot through the vice to get an estimate on what the pressure was on the inside. Since they were not certain their samples were stable they left it under pressure and cold temperatures. As stated above, they turned on the laser to get another reading before shipping off to another lab and when they turned it on one of the diamonds turned to powder!

Having just 4 particles of their sample and pile of powdered diamonds means it is probably totally lost.

But they said they were going to try again to create a new sample. But that will be some time in the future...

A new group is now claiming that they have created metallic hydrogen.

The researchers, led by Paul Loubeyre at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, first produced solid molecular hydrogen by compressing hydrogen gas between diamond tips to 310 GPa, as has been shown previously by this group and others. Then, they further cranked up the pressure and analyzed how the sample absorbed infrared radiation produced by a particle accelerator in France called the SOLEIL synchrotron. At around 425 GPa and 80 degrees above absolute zero (0 Kelvin, the temperature where all matter has the minimum amount of heat), the sample suddenly started absorbing all of the infrared radiation. This signaled to the researchers that they’d “closed the band gap,” meaning the solid material no longer required an input of energy for its electrons to jump into a state such that they would conduct through the sample.

Basically, the researchers claim that they’ve squeezed the hydrogen gas enough that quantum effects now allow the electrons to flow through the sample as they would in a metal.

gizmodo.com - 80-Year Quest to Create Metallic Hydrogen May Finally Be Complete.

The paper is on arXiv.org (pdf), so it has not been peer review or published, so there is always that to consider.

They created a new type of diamond press called a, "Toroidal Diamond Anvil Cell" or T-DAC (arxiv paper). The diamond surfaces are not flat like other anvils but have a toroid (donut-shaped) area. They claim that they pinged the thing with radiation under various pressures and watched it transition phases.

But reading further, they also mention that they ran calculations against a regular DAC and it is confusing that they do not specify which one they are talking about! So that is something else to keep in mind.

They do have photos though and it looks similar to the Harvard sample.

One thing that worries me is they did not even mention if the material was meta stable. Which is kind of what the whole world would want to know (which makes me wonder if they did that calculation reference on purpose...)

Gizmodo article asks other scientists who are pretty pumped about this announcement, so, I too hope it is the real deal!!