Settling Arguments About Hydrogen With 168 Giant Lasers

New York Times (Aug. 16) -- Recent research by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could sift out which theoretical models work in describing the properties of hydrogen under extreme conditions. Previously, David M. Ceperley, a physicist at Illinois, and his collaborators worked on herculean computer calculations, each data point the result of about 100 hours on a supercomputer with 10,000 computer cores, to model the transition of liquid hydrogen from insulator to metal. Ceperley says the Livermore results agree within about 10 percent of what their findings predicted in 2009.