Oxygen, the third most abundant element in the cosmos and essential to life on Earth, changes its forms dramatically under pressure. The underlying mechanism for these phenomena has been fascinating to scientists for decades; especially the origin of the recently discovered molecular cluster (O2)4. Researchers from the Geophysical Laboratory (GL), with colleagues used a newly developed technique and found that the interaction of molecules through their outermost electron clouds, or “orbitals,” increases with increasing pressure.
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