Like two superheroes finally joining forces, Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine – generator of the world’s most powerful electrical pulses – and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility – the planet’s most energetic laser source – in a series of 10 experiments have detailed the responses of gold and platinum at pressures so extreme that their atomic structures momentarily distorted like images in a fun-house mirror.
Similar high-pressure changes induced in other settings have produced oddities like hydrogen appearing as a metallic fluid, helium in the form of rain and sodium a transparent metal. But until now there has been no way to accurately calibrate these pressures and responses, the first step to controlling them.
Said Sandia manager Chris Seagle, an author of a technical paper recently published by the journal Science, “Our experiments are designed to measure these distortions in gold and platinum as a function of time. Compression gives us a measurement of pressure versus density.” [Read more…] about Setting gold and platinum standards where few have gone before