Gold hydride - what is the significance?

[Astronuc]

I came.across a headline and read some of the article, so I was curious.

Scientists discover that gold is a 'reactive metal' by accidentally creating a new material in the lab​

https://www.earth.com/news/discover...l-by-creating-gold-hydride-in-lab-experiment/

In a high-pressure lab experiment, scientists accidentally created a new compound called gold hydride. This particular hydride formed when thin gold foil met dense hydrogen at pressures hundreds of thousands of times Earth’s atmosphere and blazing temperatures.
. . .
By creating gold hydride in the lab, researchers opened a way to study dense hydrogen like that inside giant planets and fusing stars.

The work was led by Mungo Frost, a staff scientist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) whose research probes materials under extreme pressures and temperatures.

Gold is usually chosen for experiments like this because it barely reacts, serving as a passive X ray absorber that heats surrounding material.

Gold was expected to remain inert during the experiment, since it is normally chemically unreactive and is routinely used as an X-ray absorber for that reason.

That accidental reaction produced the first confirmed solid compound made solely of gold and hydrogen atoms in any laboratory experiment.


At the European XFEL in Germany, X-ray pulses hit a thin gold foil in the sample, which then heated the surrounding hydrocarbons.

The team cranked the pressure until it rivaled Earth’s lower mantle, then blasted the sample with trains of X-ray pulses.

Under those conditions, the study reports gold hydride forming at temperatures above 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and at pressures far beyond Earth’s mantle.

X-ray scattering patterns confirmed that carbon atoms snapped into the tidy lattice of diamond, matching what the researchers expected from earlier work.

Signals in the data revealed hydrogen atoms entering the gold lattice, forming gold hydride that altered how the metal scattered X-rays.

From SLAC - A SLAC team unexpectedly formed gold hydride in an experiment that could pave the way for studying materials under extreme conditions like those found inside certain planets and stars undergoing nuclear fusion.
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news...ented-gold-compound-extreme-heat-and-pressure

The researchers were studying how long it takes hydrocarbons, compounds made of carbon and hydrogen, to form diamonds under extremely high pressure and heat. In their experiments at the European XFEL (X-ray Free-Electron Laser) in Germany, the team studied the effect of those extreme conditions in hydrocarbon samples with an embedded gold foil, which was meant to absorb the X-rays and heat the weakly absorbing hydrocarbons. To their surprise, they not only saw the formation of diamonds, but also discovered the formation of gold hydride.

M. Frost et al., Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 4 August 2025 (10.1002/anie.202505811)
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-scientists-gold-hydride-combining-hydrogen.html

https://www.xfel.eu/news_and_events/news/index_eng.html?openDirectAnchor=2750