Science Alert April 9, 2019
Applying high pressures and temperatures to potassium creates a state in which most of the element’s atoms form a solid lattice structure. Researches in the UK used powerful computer simulations to observe this behaviour of around 20,000 potassium atoms under extreme conditions. When the pressure and temperature are high enough – around 2 to 4 Gigapascals – the potassium atoms arranged themselves in interlinked chains and lattices. The chemical interactions between the lattice atoms are strong, so they remain an ordered solid when a temperature between 400 and 800 Kelvin is applied. But meanwhile, the chains melt into a disordered, liquid state, they call “chain-melted phase”, and the team believes it may be able to exist across a range of materials, including sodium and bismuth, under the right conditions…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Potassium in paraffin oil (Jurii/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)