Metallic Hydrogen

One of the great challenges in condensed matter physics has been to produce metallic hydrogen (MH) in the laboratory. There are two approaches: solid molecular hydrogen can be compressed to high density at extreme pressures of order 5–6 megabars. The transition to MH should take place at low temperatures and is expected to occur as a structural first-order phase transition with dissociation of molecules into atoms, rather than the closing of a gap. A second approach is to produce dense molecular hydrogen at pressures of order 1–2 megabars and heat the sample. With increasing temperature, it was predicted that molecular hydrogen first melts and then dissociates to atomic metallic liquid hydrogen as a first-order phase transition. We have observed this liquid–liquid phase transition to metallic hydrogen, also called the plasma phase transition. In low-temperature studies, we have pressurized HD to over 3 megabars and observed two new phases. Molecular hydrogen has been pressurized to 4.2 megabars. A new phase transition has been observed at 3.55 megabars, but it is not yet metallic.