At pressures above 90 gigapascals (GPa), sulfur switches from behaving like a nonmetal to behaving like a metal. Lower the temperature and the highly pressurized metal then starts superconducting. Reaching such prodigious pressures requires placing the sulfur in a diamond-anvil cell, a device that previously precluded the making of all but the simplest measurements of the system. Now, however, Feng Du of the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry, Germany, and his collaborators have instrumented a sulfur sample held at a pressure of up to 160 GPa [1]. Their achievement could allow researchers to probe the high-pressure properties of the growing number of materials that have recently been found to superconduct in this pressure regime.
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