Scientists Have Transformed Pure Water Into a Metal - ScienceAlert
Pure water only becomes "metallic" - electronically conductive - at extremely high pressures, beyond our current abilities to produce in a lab.
But, as researchers have now demonstrated for the first time, it's not only high pressures that can induce this metallicity in pure water.By bringing pure water into contact with an electron-sharing alkali metal - in this case an alloy of sodium and potassium - free-moving charged particles can be added, turning water metallic.While pressures exceeding this have been generated in a laboratory setting, such experiments would be unsuitable for studying metallic water.In a vacuum chamber, the team started by extruding from a nozzle a small blob of sodium-potassium alloy, which is liquid at room temperature, and very carefully added a thin film of pure water using vapor deposition.Not only did this give the water a golden shine, it turned the water conductive - just like we should see in metallic pure water at high pressure.