Personally, I’m excited about the formation of Solid Metallic Hydrogen in the lab. (Although, it only has 52% odds of being a big deal, as measured by citation count.) SMH may be stable at room temperature, and the SMH to gas phase transition could release more energy than chemical reactions do, making it more energy dense than rocket fuel. Additionally, there’s like a ~35% chance of it superconducting at room temperature.
(As a side note, does anyone know whether something like this might make fusion pressures easier to achieve? I realize starting off a little more dense than other forms of solid hydrogen won’t help much, but could the compression force and heating from the energy released supply the energy needed, similar to General Fusion’s approach but starting with a solid instead of a plasma? Or, if it superconducts and has a high critical current density, could that enable stronger magnetic fields and stronger z pinch, or is that not the limiting factor?)
I’m not a physicist, but if I wanted to fuse metallic hydrogen I’d think about a really direct approach: shooting two deuterium/tritium bullets at each other at 1.5% of c (for a Coulomb barrier of 0.1 MeV according to Wikipedia). The most questionable part I can see is that a nucleus from one bullet could be expected to miss thousands of nuclei from the other, before it hit one, and I would worry about losing too much energy to bremsstrahlung in those encounters.
Personally, I’m excited about the formation of Solid Metallic Hydrogen in the lab. (Although, it only has 52% odds of being a big deal, as measured by citation count.) SMH may be stable at room temperature, and the SMH to gas phase transition could release more energy than chemical reactions do, making it more energy dense than rocket fuel. Additionally, there’s like a ~35% chance of it superconducting at room temperature.
(As a side note, does anyone know whether something like this might make fusion pressures easier to achieve? I realize starting off a little more dense than other forms of solid hydrogen won’t help much, but could the compression force and heating from the energy released supply the energy needed, similar to General Fusion’s approach but starting with a solid instead of a plasma? Or, if it superconducts and has a high critical current density, could that enable stronger magnetic fields and stronger z pinch, or is that not the limiting factor?)
I’m not a physicist, but if I wanted to fuse metallic hydrogen I’d think about a really direct approach: shooting two deuterium/tritium bullets at each other at 1.5% of c (for a Coulomb barrier of 0.1 MeV according to Wikipedia). The most questionable part I can see is that a nucleus from one bullet could be expected to miss thousands of nuclei from the other, before it hit one, and I would worry about losing too much energy to bremsstrahlung in those encounters.