Using a powerful laser, researchers turn plastic into diamonds and a new kind of water
Scientists used high-power laser beams. To turn cheap bits of plastic into tiny nanodiamonds, they prove the existence of a strange new type of water.
These discoveries could show that diamonds rain on the icy giant planets in our solar system, explain why these planets have strange magnetic fields, and could lead to more real-world applications of laser collimation.
The co-author of the study, a physicist at the Helmholtz Center for Scientific Research in Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany, says to Dominique Krause: “Nanodiamonds are measured in a few nanometers or billionths of a meter, and they have many actual and potential applications, such as converting carbon dioxide into other gases and introducing medicines.” to the body.”
"Nanodiamonds can be used as ultra-small, ultra-accurate quantum sensors for temperature and magnetic fields, which could lead to many applications," Krause says.
According to Krause, this technology could reduce plastic pollution by creating a financial incentive to clean, divert and utilize plastic from the oceans.
An experiment with great applications for giant icy planets
Planetary scientists have suspected for many years that diamonds form in the cores of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus, and if they do, it would rain in these icy planets.
To see if this process was possible, the researchers experimented on a chip of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, which is used in plastic bottles, and used the high-energy laser in the MEC instrument from SLAC's LCLS facility to heat piece of plastic to about 6,000 degrees Celsius.
This resulted in pressures millions of times greater than Earth's atmospheric pressure for billionths of a second. This enormous pressure shocked the plastic, causing its carbon atoms to reshape into a crystalline structure, with hydrogen and oxygen atoms floating through this lattice.
"Using a powerful X-ray laser, we were able to look inside the samples and create a recording of the chemical reactions taking place there," says Krause.
The new research shows that this type of diamond formation may be more common than researchers previously thought, raising the possibility that icy giant planets may have thick layers of diamond around their solid cores.
The experiment also suggests that a strange state of water called superionic water emerges at the high temperatures and pressures found in the cores of these icy planets.
This strange type of water allows protons to move through a lattice of oxygen atoms. And if this superionized water is present in icy giant planets such as Uranus and Neptune, the movement of protons through this exotic type of matter could help generate the unique magnetic fields observed on these planets.
Previous calculations suggested that carbon atoms likely to reside in planetary interiors would make any superionic water that forms there highly unstable.
However, Krause says, "our experiments now show that water and carbon dissociate (unintentional separation of compounds within a mixture) by forming diamonds, so isolated water may exist within planets, increasing the possibility of superionic water formation."
And a spacecraft may soon be able to visit nearby icy planets to see if a rain of diamonds and strange water really exists there.
"We hope that a new NASA probe will be launched to Uranus within the next decade, which has been identified as a top priority in the Periodic Decadal Survey," Krause says.
The discoveries may have more commercial applications.
Nano-diamonds are now made by exploding carbon or fragmenting large diamonds using explosives, which forms a mixture of diamonds of different sizes. The new method is a cleaner way to make diamond segments of specific sizes.
Source: websites