Laboratory experiments for replicating these extreme conditions, too, were decades away. Recent gains in computing power and algorithms, coupled with new experimental methods, are opening to study this once inaccessible physical realm. Scientists knowledge of the pressures necessary for hydrogen's transition to a metal, for example, has grown steadily since Wigner's day. Now, physicists are zeroing in on how this transition occurs. They know that when they compress hydrogen, its electrons abandon their usual spherical orbits and lock into a herringbone lattice, with the alternating rows pointing in different directions.
Greater compression is thought to force the electrons into a simple metallic lattice.
Last updated Mar. 1, 1999. All rights reserved.