Heating that lasted only trillionths of a second raised a gold sample’s temperature to 19,000 K without melting it, a study ...

Physicists superheated gold to 14 times its melting point, disproving a long-standing prediction about the temperature limits ...

It’s not easy to surprise physicists with a phase change. Yet when Tom White first reviewed the data from a new experiment that used lasers to heat gold, he had to pause and double-check his results.

Researchers have been able to heat up a sample of solid gold to over 14 times its melting temperature for a fraction of a second, bypassing a theoretical limit known as the entropy catastrophe. The ...