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
Helical boundary conditions Helical boundary conditions In mathematics, helical boundary conditions are a variation on periodic boundary conditions. Helical boundary conditions provide a method for determining the index of a lattice site's neighbours when each lattice site is indexed by just a single coordinate. On a lattice of dimension "d" where the lattice sites are numbered from 1 to "N" and "L" is the width (i.e. number of elements per row) of the lattice in all but the last dimension, the neighbors of site "i" are: It is not necessary that "N" = "L". Helical boundary conditions make it possible to use only