From ScienceNordic:
Historic discovery: huge electric field occurs spontaneously in laughing gas
Danish scientists thought they had made a mistake when they discovered a huge electric field in a thin layer of solid nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.
As it transpires, however, they had discovered a new and astounding electrical phenomenon.
It was one of those ordinary days in the lab in the basement beneath Aarhus University. Two young physicists were examining how electrons pass through nitrous oxide.
They had frozen the gas to minus 233 °C making the molecules of the gas settle as an extremely thin film above a metal surface.
There wasn't supposed to be anything special about the ice-cold laughing gas, but the young researchers' measurements indicated something else - something completely different.
"They came upstairs and knocked on my door, saying ‘David, there's something not right’. At first we thought the experiment had gone wrong, because it wasn't supposed to be possible for a current to pass through the film and be detected. No external voltage was applied," remembers David Field, Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University.
During the next few days, however, the scientists continued to see huge electric fields across the thin film of laughing gas, and it soon became clear that they had discovered an entirely new electrical phenomenon.
The findings have recently been published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.
No word as to the capacity or if the reaction is rechargable but this could be a big breakthrough in battery and/or generating technology.
ScienceNordic is a great read.
