Potentially Most Valuable Substance on Earth

When you think of valuable substances, what comes to mind? Diamonds? Precious metals like gold and platinum? Guess what could be even more precious? Metallic Hydrogen! The material was theorized nearly a hundred years ago, but scientists have only just manged to produce it.

At Harvard, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, Isaac Silvera and post-doctoral fellow Ranga Dias finally created a physical sample of metallic hydrogen. As per Silvera this is the holy grail of high-pressure physics. It’s the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so when you’re looking at it, you’re looking at something that’s never existed before.

A tiny sample of hydrogen was squeezed into 495 gigapascal, or more than 71.7 million pounds-per-square inch. At that pressure the molecular hydrogen breaks down to form an atomic hydrogen which is metallic in nature. There are a number of potential uses of the material including being a superconductor.

Since it is predicted to be meta-stable, that is it will stay a metal even after the pressure is removed, there will be a whole lot more possible uses of metallic hydrogen. Needless to say this science experiment is in it’s nascent stage and a whole lot more work is required in the field before it becomes actually useful.