While there are some doubters, as Professor Silvera said himself: “I don’t want to guess, I want to do the experiment.” He feels accomplished already in figuring out the precise pressure at which hydrogen becomes a metal. “I think there’s a good chance that it’s correct,” said theoretical physicist David Ceperley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Harvard scientists also have supporters in the scientific community. “Then they have to show that, in this pressure range, the alumina is not becoming metallic.” “If they want to be convincing, they have to redo the measurement, really measuring the evolution of pressure,” said Loubeyre. The editor of the magazine Science, which published their paper, also weighed in, saying that all papers must pass great scrutiny when peer-reviewed by experts and only 7% make it to publication.Īnother scientist, geophysicist Alexander Goncharov of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, has questioned whether the created material might actually be alumina (aluminum oxide) which is used on the tips of the diamonds the experiment. “If we did it again, we’d get the same result, I’m certain,” said Dr. They also managed to polish the tips of the diamonds they used in a way that prevented them from breaking, an issue at such pressures. In particular, they figured out how to use greater pressures than anyone else was able to before. Other scientists are wondering how this team accomplished something that others have not yet been able to approach.ĭias and Silvera defended their work, saying that their accomplishment rests on utilizing novel techniques, improving on previous research. “I don’t think the paper is convincing at all,” said Paul Loubeyre, a physicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel, to Nature. Since there is such potential for this to be a transformative accomplishment, some scientists have taken Silvera and Dias to task for not providing more details at this stage. In fact, this release of energy would make metallic hydrogen 4 times as powerful as existing fuels.įirst predicted by physicists Hillard Huntington and Eugene Wigner in 1935, there have been failed attempts to create metallic hydrogen previously, with the race to make it tightening between a number of teams. “And if you convert it back to molecular hydrogen, all that energy is released, so it would make it the most powerful rocket propellant known to man, and could revolutionize rocketry, enabling you to explore the outer planets, to put rockets into orbit with a single stage, and lift large payloads.” “It takes a tremendous amount of energy to make metallic hydrogen,” said Silvera. What’s more, NASA has provided some of Silvera’s funding in hopes that metallic hydrogen could be used as rocket propellant. This would create a repulsive magnetic force, with much potential to disrupt the transportation industry. “The most romantic application of superconductivity,” Dias said, would be “magnetic levitation of high-speed trains, based on the perfect diamagnetism of superconductors.” His colleague Ranga Dias sees another application: “As much as 15 per cent 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,” pointed out Silvera. What will be the benefits of metallic hydrogen if the physicists can show the stability of their metal and be able to recreate it?
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