The discovery, published in the journal Science on Thursday, provides the first confirmation of a theory proposed in 1935 by physicists Hillard Bell Huntington and Eugene Wigner that hydrogen, normally a gas, could occur in a metallic state if exposed to extreme pressure.
US scientists have succeeded in squeezing hydrogen so intensely that it has turned into a metal, creating an entirely new material that might be used as a highly efficient electricity conductor at room temperatures.
Several teams have been racing to develop metallic hydrogen, which is highly prized because of its potential as a superconductor, a material that is extremely efficient at conducting electricity.Currently, superconductors such as those used in a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machines must be cooled with liquid helium to keep them at extremely low temperatures, which is costly.
"This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics," Harvard physicist Isaac Silvera, one of the study's authors, said in a statement. "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."David Ceperley, a physics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the research, said the discovery, if confirmed, would end a decades-long quest to see how hydrogen can become a metal, adding to the understanding of the most common element in the universe.
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