A team of international scientists, without the help of a time-traveling Scott and a 512k Mac, have discovered a transparent metal. Unfortunately, we’re talking sodium, and not aluminum. And it’s at a pressure of about 2 million atmospheres.

The team, led by Artem Oganov, Professor of Theoretical Crystallography at Stony Brook University, and Yanming Ma, the lead author and professor of physics at Jilin University in China, was able to demonstrate that sodium turns transparent under pressure.

Typically, elements turn metallic at high pressure—forming a lattice of positive ions surrounded by electrons. Metallic elements are magnetic and conductive. It even happens to hydrogen, in the highly pressurized center of gas giants like Saturn and Pluto. Sodium does just the opposite, first becoming an insulator, then transparent like glass.

Ma and Oganav used mathematical models to predict sodium’s surprising response under pressure, but hadn’t tested them. Mikhail Eremets, the leader of an experimental group at Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, engineered several experiments to test the theories.

The discovery will help scientists study the chemistry found at the center of gas giants and stars.

Link to ScienceDaily article