{"id":10803,"date":"2018-05-22T13:05:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T11:05:49","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2018-05-23T12:41:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T10:41:23","slug":"ino-cnr-researchers-unveils-a-structural-modification-in-liquid-rubidium-at-pressures-of-75000-atm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/?p=10803","title":{"rendered":"INO-CNR researchers unveils a structural modification in liquid Rubidium at pressures of 75000 atm."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>INO-CNR researchers working on Matter and Materials at Extreme Conditions (Federico Gorelli and Mario Santoro) led a recent challenging study on an archetypal simple metal: Rubidium, at high pressure and high temperature conditions. These researchers, together with colleagues of IIT (Simone De Panfilis) and of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, ESRF-Grenoble, found that melted Rubidium undergoes a structural transformation between two distinct liquid forms or phases, at about 75000 atm. and 300 \u00b0C. Indeed, liquid-liquid transformations are not common and, consequently, rather surprising, within a traditional view of phase diagrams of pure substances. Common phase transitions for these systems are instead the vapour-liquid, liquid-solid, and vapour-solid phase transitions, whereas this scenario is strongly modified at extreme conditions. In fact, high pressure leads to a plethora of astonishing solid-solid phase transitions along with the here mentioned, more exotic liquid-liquid transition. Demanding synchrotron X-ray diffraction measurements in diamond anvil cells show that while ambient pressure melted Rb is a text-book simple liquid with almost the highest possible atomic packing, the high pressure liquid phase of this element is made of a remarkably more complex and open atomic structure, namely a structure with an increased number of voids. This transformation is traced back to the metallic Rb-Rb bond turning into a bond more similar to those of covalent materials, a modification that may ultimately lead to the metallic-insulator transition already observed in Lithium and Sodium The pressure driven simple-to-complex transformation in liquid Rubidium is likely to be a common feature of all alkali metals, and the discovery of this phenomenon opens a new scenario to the fundamental investigation of liquid matter with potential applications to metallic alloys. The original paper is now published on J. Phys. Chem. Letters (<a href=\"https:\/\/pubs.acs.org\/articlesonrequest\/AOR-d2mSWZNJmqrF25zpvSdD\">https:\/\/pubs.acs.org\/articlesonrequest\/AOR-d2mSWZNJmqrF25zpvSdD<\/a> DOI: 10.1021\/acs.jpclett.8b01094).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two distinct liquid phases in an elemental system: Rubidium<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":515,"featured_media":10810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-researchfocus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/515"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10803"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10808,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10803\/revisions\/10808"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ino.cnr.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}