New state of matter discovered

[jmowreader]

http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news/NewsReleases/2004/NR-04-10-02.html

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has discovered a new state of matter. Dubbed "superfluid," it occurs just above the melting point of hydrogen when the hydrogen's pressure is raised to 2 million atmospheres--30 million PSI at sea level.

I am certain that this provides great insight into the workings of the universe, so I have but one question: How, exactly, do you raise the pressure of hydrogen to 30 million PSI?

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Verrrrrrrry carefully!

:)

[DrWeird]

2. Welllll...

I just pulled the original article from Nature (or at least what I think was the original paper, you'd think they'd at least give a proper citation), and the "new state of matter" is just theorized ab initio via simulation and was not actually created.

That said, people usually use diamond anvil presses to create high pressures in laboratories. Although I''ve heard of large gas driven guns used in metallic hydrogen research.

[Q3JR4]

3. We've had various "superfluid" states.

Helium, for instance, exhibits such a state at extremely low temperatures.

To raise the pressure you essentially take a small portion of hydrogen place it into a thin cavity made through a piece of soft metal and put that between two specially cut diamonds--making sure that the diamonds don't touch--glued to two pieces of metal linked together with three screws (diamond anvil).

The setup is such that when you tighten the screws a few microns, the diamonds squeeze the cavity in such a way that the pressure can be increased. You can get on the order of 10 Gpa (10*1,000,000,000) Pascals and beyond. Since 1 atm=101.3 kPa=14.7 psi, we're talking about 1451140 PSI. Eventually the diamonds will fracture, but intense pressures can be reached with a smaller cut of diamond with beveled culets.

It can be done, expensive but only difficult in a minor way I think.

The difficult part comes in reading the experimental results and or viewing the new material.

[venus]

4. Wow.. thanks. n/r