Livermore's Big Guns Produce Liquid Metallic Hydrogen

The seventy‐year search for metallic hydrogen has demonstrated repeatedly that the hydrogen molecule's simplicity is deceptive. Three generations of theorists have predicted that sufficient pressure would squeeze a crystal of hydrogen into a metallic state, perhaps exhibiting exotic phenomena. Blithely ignoring most of these predictions, hydrogen at high pressures did indeed exhibit some remarkable behaviors, but it stubbornly resisted metallization.