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Harvard scientists triumphantly announced that they'd created metallic hydrogen last month, but now it's suddenly gone. Scientists hailed it as the “holy grail” of high pressure physics when they finally produced it in the lab: metallic hydrogen, a century after it was first theorized to exist. And now that sample, which had been held in a hyper refrigerated laboratory, has vanished into thin air, and scientists can’t figure out why. Reports indicate that the metallic hydrogen had been kept between a vice of two diamonds at huge pressures while being stored at 80 Kelvin, but something happened in the lab...

Producing metallic hydrogen in the laboratory has been a dream of high-pressure researchers ever since 1935, when theorists first predicted its existence3. When squeezed with enough pressure inside an anvil, hydrogen should be able to conduct electricity, the hallmark of a metallic state. And theorists say that the material could have other exotic properties, such as being a superconductor...even at room temperature. ... Dias and Silvera say that they were able to squeeze their hydrogen gas at greater pressures than anyone else has managed. To do so, they used an anvil that can fit inside a cryostat, enabling them to...

Schematic phase diagram of hydrogen. The figure shows the four known solid phases I to IV and two observed liquid phases, together with the predicted atomic liquid. Blue rings imply rotating quantum molecules, wiggly lines imply entangled rotor state, and solid bonds are where calculation shows a covalent bond. Credit: Science 26 June 2015: Vol. 348 no. 6242 pp. 1429-1430. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac6626 (Phys.org)—A team of researchers working at Sandia National Labs working with another team from the University of Rostock in Germany, has succeeded in squeezing liquid deuterium into becoming what appeared to be a metal. In their paper published...