Black metal hydrogen above 360 GPa driven by proton quantum fluctuations

Observed metallization of hydrogen interpreted as a band structure effect

“…However, these effects are not expected to be fully uniform in the reciprocal space, so the experimental transition pressures may turn out to be shifted up or down with respect to these reported values. Recent works that include nuclear quantum effects have found electronic band gap values that generally agree with ours but are only provided for coarser pressure grids [40,41], and there is no established methodology to compute these effects together with the GW corrections. Therefore, by following a less computationally costly methodology that reveals the electronic structure in its full detail, we are able to study this system on a finer pressure grid, and reveal a sequence of qualitative transitions.…”