Gold survives 19,000 kelvins without melting, breaks physics limits

Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Nevada, Reno, have conducted a groundbreaking experiment demonstrating that gold can survive temperatures as high as 19,000 kelvins—about 14 times its normal melting point of 1,337 kelvins—without melting. Using ultrafast lasers to superheat a nanoscale gold sample and ultrabright X-rays to directly measure atomic vibrations and temperature, the team bypassed traditional indirect methods and provided the first direct temperature measurements in “warm dense matter.” This discovery overturns a four-decade-old theory that predicted solids would disintegrate at much lower temperatures, redefining the limits of superheating and challenging the long-held concept of the entropy catastrophe, which posits a hard upper temperature limit for solids. The key to gold’s survival at such extreme temperatures lies in the ultrafast heating process, occurring within trillionths of a second, which prevents the material from expanding or losing its crystalline structure. Importantly, this does