Oct 2, 2006

2, 4, 6, 8 - team oxygen

Posted in Chemistry, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- 1 Comment

Nature described this finding as “surprising, elegant, and entirely useless”. Well, the journal is half right. Solid elemental oxygen is not thought to exist anywhere on earth or even elsewhere in the universe under the immense pressures created by Malcolm McMahon and Paul Loubeyre. They and their colleagues put the squeeze on solid oxygen, which forms deep red crystals at above a million atmospheres. They used various techniques to determine the structure of this new material and found that oxygen atoms team up to form clusters of eight in the solid. A seemingly esoteric discovery you might think.

However, the new understanding gained of materials under pressure could lead to new efficient rocket fuels or superhard materials formed from oxygen, nitrogen, or carbon that beat diamond for toughness.

Moreover, the results suggest that hydrogen might also form metallic crystals of a similar nature to solid oxygen at 450 gigapascals (4.5 million times terrestrial atmospheric pressure). Such pressures exist at Jupiter’s core astronomers think. Under these conditions metallic hydrogen may behave as an exotic superconductor or superfluid. That finding may be elegant, certainly no longer surprising, but too perhaps even more useless!

Read the full story in SpectroscopyNOW.com

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