Published in Chemistry World, 11 Mar 2009
Two independent teams have demonstrated that metals can lose their high conductivity under pressure, proving that the standard models used to describe their behaviour are inadequate.
Yanming Ma of Jilin University in Changchun, China, and colleagues from Switzerland, Germany, Russia and the US have shown that sufficient pressure causes sodium to become optically transparent. Meanwhile, Takahiro Matsuoka and Katsuya Shimizu of Osaka University, Japan, have shown that it causes lithium to turn into a semiconductor. […]
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