Lithium be cut with a knife. When cut, it possesses a silvery-white color that quickly changes to gray as it oxidizes to lithium oxide. While it has one of the lowest melting points among all metals (180 °C), it has the highest melting and boiling points of the alkali metals. Lithium has a very low density (0.534 g/cm), comparable with pine wood. It is the least dense of all elements that are solids at room temperature; the next lightest solid element (potassium, at 0.862 g/cm) is more than 60% denser. Furthermore, apart from helium and hydrogen, it is less dense than
Metallic hydrogen metallized and become superconducting by M.I. Eremets "et al.". This claim is disputed, and their results have not been repeated. In 2011 Eremets and Troyan reported observing the liquid metallic state of hydrogen and deuterium at static pressures of . This claim was questioned by other researchers in 2012. In 2015, scientists at the Z Pulsed Power Facility announced the creation of metallic deuterium using dense liquid deuterium, an electrical insulator-to-conductor transition associated with an increase in optical reflectivity. On 5 October 2016, Ranga Dias and Isaac F. Silvera of Harvard University released claims of experimental evidence that solid metallic