Speaker 0:  hydrogen may be the fuel of the future, but storing it remains an expensive engineering headache. researchers have now discovered changing the symmetry of vanadium's crystal lattice can switch hydrogen between quantum tunneling and ordinary heat driven movement. so the crystal symmetry switches hydrogen's behavior. university of tokyo researchers have found hydrogen moves unusually quickly through symmetrical low hydrogen vanadium because its quantum state can spread across multiple lattice sites. at higher concentration, this crystal stretches into less symmetrical phase, localizing the hydrogen and forcing it to move slower through thermally activated hopping. what do you think about this, john?

Speaker 1:  my favorite chemical element. love hydrogen. but let's let's kind of just break this down. so if you can imagine trying to walk through a neighborhood filled with fences, normally, you'd have to climb over those fences before moving to the next yard. but quantum mechanics, or some people like to call it magic, sometimes allows something remarkable. what it does is it lets hydrogen effectively pass through the fence instead of having to climb over it. and now scientists have discovered what determines whether hydrogen can perform this quantum shortcut. so what they found is that when hydrogen moves inside the metal vanadium, everything depends on how neatly the metals atoms are arranged. so if the crystal structure remains highly symmetrical, hydrogen behaves like a quantum wave and can tunnel through energy barriers with surprising efficiency. but when more hydrogen enters the metal, the crystal becomes distorted, switching hydrogen back to behaving like an ordinary particle that must over come each barrier conventionally. and so this discovery is helping engineers design much better materials for storing and transporting hydrogen, which is one of the leading candidates for clean energy, which is what i love so much, and i need to put my money where my mouth is at some point. but, so why vanadium matters is because it has long attracted attention because it readily absorbs hydrogen into its crystal lattice. so unlike a gas tank that physically contains hydrogen, vanadium stores hydrogen inside the atomic structure of itself. and so hydrogen atoms occupy tiny spaces between the vanadium atoms called interstitial sites. and so the challenge is that hydrogen doesn't simply sit still. it continuously diffuses through the crystal. and so understanding how hydrogen moves, it's going to determine storage efficiency, charging speed, discharge rate, material lifetime, and mechanical stability. and until now, scientists knew hydrogen sometimes exhibited quantum behavior and sometimes classical behavior, but they didn't understand why. so this is super cool. what do you think about this? does this give us another, another step into hydrogen becoming the clean energy of choice?

Speaker 0:  maybe. anytime where we can start restoring it, storing it at room temperature is helpful. and if we can extol, store it in, crystal forms, etcetera, which is interesting, we have to see if that becomes usable. meaning, can you do that, say, in a hydrogen energy cell, store this in something like this, and then slow release by just changing the electricity through it or changing the structure, that would allow it to flow or make it slow. and being able to do the distortion, would allow a lot of either storage or flowing of the hydrogen. this is very interesting, especially when you can really control it at the physical state rather than at a liquid or gaseous state because, you have less likelihood of explosions and whatnot. so all of that, makes me very excited. so replace ordinary hydrogen with heavier deuterium and tunneling becomes less likely because tunneling probability is extremely sensitive to particle mass. so isotope testing can help distinguish genuine quantum transport from classical diffusion. vanadium is already economically important for strengthening steel and was included in the united states 2025, critical minerals list. a successful, storage technology would therefore compete for supply with an established industrial market. vanadium was named after vanatus, another name for north goddess, freya, because vanadium compounds produce an unusually colorful range of oxidation states. so this was a 40 nanometre laboratory field study largely at cryogenic temperatures. so the researchers did not demonstrate a full size tank storage, room temperature performance, rapid refueling, long term cycling, manufacturing cost or commercially useful system level capacity. so claims that this discovery will directly unlock hydrogen tax credits or eliminate high pressure storage are therefore pretty speculative. so i like where this is going, but we've got a long way to prove that this is, effective.

Speaker 1:  yeah. and this is one step closer to solving one of hydrogen's biggest problems is storing it. so yes. because hydrogen will escape through tiny defects. it weakens metal. it requires high pressure, sometimes low temperature, which they've somewhat overcome, and it's difficult to transport economically. so, every step is one step closer. right? so, this is the breakthrough here is discovering the switch that turns that quantum behavior on and off here. it's not that it hydrogen behaves like, behaves quantum mechanically because we've known that for decades. so, it's that switch that they found. so this will be interesting to see, how this will affect other hydrogen research going forward, especially when it comes to storage.

Speaker 0:  this is not a quantum hydrogen tank. it is a newly identified atomic control knob that could help engineers design one. would you trust hydrogen stored inside a metal lattice, or would you prefer, batteries for vehicle and grid storage? let us know in the comments below. we'd love to hear your thoughts.