Ranga Dias (scientist)
Ranga Dias is a Sri Lankan born scientist, physicist, researcher currently working in the Lyman Laboratory of Physics at Harvard University.
He graduated from the Department of Physics, Colombo University, Sri Lanka and moved to Washington, USA in 2007 for Ph.D. work at Washington State University in the field of extreme condensed matter physics. During his Ph.D. research at Washington State University he discovered a new class of highly conducting metallic and superconducting polymers; his CV lists 7 papers published since 2011 in the fields of solid state physics and extreme high pressure, while 16 are listed at ORCID.
In January 2017, Dias and Isaac F. Silvera at Harvard University reported the creation of metallic hydrogen in a laboratory. They claimed to have gathered experimental evidence that solid metallic hydrogen had been synthesised, using a diamond anvil cell.
According to the reports in Science and the Harvard Gazette, the two physicists claimed to have crushed hydrogen under immense pressures, whereupon the gas became a shiny metal, a feat that physicists have been trying to accomplish for more than 80 years, since the possibility of achieving this was originally theorised in 1935 by Wigner and Huntington. Contrary to the claim, an article in Nature names five physicists who are not convinced that hydrogen has been squeezed to a metallic form inside a diamond-tipped anvil in this work.
