Metallic solid hydrogen: The “holy grail” of high-pressure physics

In this talk I’ll present comprehensive results for the high-pressure phase diagram of solid hydrogen.
I mainly focus on the energetically most favorable molecular and atomic crystal structures. I briefly describe semi-local and hybrid density functional theory (DFT) as well as diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) methods, which have employed to obtain the ground-state static and dynamic phase diagram.
The closure of the band-gap with increasing pressure is investigated utilizing quasi-particle many-body calculations within the GW approximation. I show that the molecular-to-atomic phase transition happens at
the experimentally accessible pressure range.

1. Physical Review Letters 112 (16), 165501 (2014)
2. Physical Review B 90, 014110 (2014)
3. Physical Review B 88 (1), 014115 (2013)
4. New Journal of Physics 15, 113005 (2013)
5. JETP letters 95 (9), 449-453 (2012)