It's almost impossible to find a water that isn't pure water.
Water found in nature conducts electricity because of the free ion that is dissolved into the water. Our current ability to produce pure water in a lab is not enough to make it "metallic".
It's not only high pressures that can cause this metallicity in water.
Free moving charged particles can be added to the water to turn it metallic.
It only lasts a few seconds, but it is a significant step towards being able to understand this phase of water.
Robert Seidel from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin fr Materialien und Energie in Germany said that you can see the phase transition to metallic water with the naked eye.
The golden glow of the droplets is very impressive.
It is possible that any material could become conductive.
The idea is that if you squeeze the atoms together tightly, the outer electrons can move around. The pressure for water is close to 48 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure.
Experiments that exceed this are not suitable for studying metallic water. A group of researchers, led by an organic chemist, turned to alkali metals.
The substances release their outer electrons very easily, which means they can induce the electron-sharing properties of highly pressurized pure water.
There's a problem with alkali metals, they're highly reactive with liquid water, sometimes even to the point of explosivity.
You'll get a kaboom if you drop the metal in the water.
This problem was solved by the research team. Adding water to the metal would add to it.
In a vacuum chamber, the team started by extruding from a nozzle a small blob of sodium-potassium alloy, which is liquid at room temperature, and very carefully added a thin film of pure water.
The metal cations flowed into the water after contact.
This gave the water a golden shine and turned it into a metallic pure water.
This was confirmed using two different methods.
Two different frequencies allowed for the identification of the golden sheen and theconductive band.
The research could allow a close study of extreme high-pressure conditions inside large planets and give us a better understanding of this phase transition here on Earth.
Liquid metallic hydrogen is thought to swirl in the ice planets of the solar system. Jupiter is believed to be the only place in the world where pressures are high enough to metallicize pure water.
The prospect of replicating the conditions inside our solar system's planetary colossus is exciting.
Seidel said that their study shows that metallic water can be produced on Earth.
The research was published in a scientific journal.
The first version of this article was published in July of 2011.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
