The latest news from academia, regulators research labs and
other things of interest Posted: February 12, 2007 Gold unstable
at high pressures (Nanowerk News) Gold is not as noble and
stable as it has been previously thought. This is the conclusion
of an international team of researchers from Germany, France and
Sweden who came to the ESRF to study the structure of this
material at high pressure. They present their results in
Physical Review Letters (" Noblest of All Metals Is Structurally
Unstable at High Pressure"). The uniqueness of gold and its
appreciation as a valuable throughout history is closely related
to its exceptional stability to chemical reactions and extreme
pressures and temperatures. Gold was considered as a synonym of
immovability and constancy (remember the wedding rings!).
Indeed, at ambient pressure gold has been known to remain stable
in a cubic crystalline phase to at least 180 GPa (one million
eight hundred thousand atmospheres). Scientists from the
Bayerisches Geoinstitut and the Uni