1,9 million EU grant for Mikhail Eremets from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
Dr. Mikhail Eremets from the Max Planck Institute for chemistry has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council end of October. The sum of € 1.9 million was granted for exploring conductive and metallic hydrogen. In his project, Eremets plans to study molecular hydrogen under extremely high pressure conditions with the objective of achieving its metallic state and thus its superconductivity.
A central part of this project is the study of hydrogen at record pressures of up to 440 GPa (4.4 Megabars). Such high pressures have been achieved recently by Eremets and his team with a special diamond anvil cell. This pressure, which exceeds that at the center of the Earth corresponds to that calculated to transfer hydrogen into its metallic state. In addition to studying metallic hydrogen directly, the Max Planck researcher intends to investigate hydrogen-rich compounds such as silane (SiH4), methane (CH4), and other molecules. These materials are expected to metallize at much lower pressures than pure hydrogen, and indeed, superconductivity was recently detected for silane. “The ERC grant is a great honor and I hope to approach basic questions about metallic hydrogen which astrophysicists see as the main constituent of giant planets and stars”, Eremets stated.
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