The metal–non-metal transition in compressed metal

FRIEDRICH HENSEL; ERNESTO MARCECA; W. CHRISTIAN PILGRIM

JOURNAL OF PHYSICS CONDENSED MATTER

Institute of Physics

Año: 1998 vol. 10 p. 11395 - 11404

0953-8984

Knowledge of the properties of hydrogen and helium and their mixtures, at temperatures and pressures prevailing in the giant planets is of considerable interest for planetary modelling. In the light of the unfavourable outlook for reliable measurements under these extreme conditions effort has been spent investigating the high-temperature high-pressure properties of fluid metals which are experimentally accessible in the laboratory and which might serve as models for compressed fluid hydrogen. The main emphasis of the paper is on the density dependence of the dynamic structure factor S(Q,w) of liquid rubidium which reveals that a monoatomic–molecular transition occurs in the metal–non-metal transition region of the expanded liquid analogous to that suggested to occur in shock compressed hydrogen. Additional emphasis is on new results of the phase behaviour of dilute mixtures of helium in the near critical metal mercury.