Experiments find a new way to generate nanodiamonds from plastic bottles
Market Information Network 2022-09-05 11:25:51 Source: China Economic Net Comments:
Do planets like Neptune and Uranus really get ‘diamond rain’ inside? To find out, the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostock and ETH France An international team led by an international team has carried out a novel experiment that confirms their earlier view that “diamond rain” does indeed occur in ice giants in the outer solar system. At the same time, the experiment also discovered a new way to produce nanodiamonds. The research results were published in the latest issue of the journal Science Advances.
The interiors of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus are extremely hot, reaching several thousand degrees Celsius, and the pressure is millions of times that of Earth’s atmosphere. Ice giants contain not only carbon and hydrogen, but also large amounts of oxygen. The researchers found that PET resin, which is used to make ordinary plastic bottles, has a good balance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate activity on ice giants.
In the experiment, the researchers performed a simple simulation of the interior of the ice giant: a simple PET plastic sheet was irradiated with a powerful laser, which instantly heated it to 6000 ° C and generated a shock wave that could reach 1 million times the atmospheric pressure. Compress matter in nanoseconds. The researchers found that this extreme pressure created tiny diamonds, so-called nanodiamonds.
The team conducted experiments with the Linear Accelerator Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser to analyze what happens when an intense laser hits a PET film, whether nanodiamonds are produced and how fast and how large the diamonds grow.
“The role of oxygen is to accelerate the decomposition of carbon and hydrogen, promoting the formation of nanodiamonds, which means that carbon atoms combine more easily to form diamonds,” said HZDR physicist Dominique Krause, professor at the University of Rostock. This further supports the fact that The assumption is that diamonds really rain down inside ice giants. This phenomenon may exist not only on Uranus and Neptune, but also on countless other planets in the Milky Way.
The team also found a clue: Oxygen combined with diamonds should create an unusual type of superionic water that could help create the ice giant’s magnetic field. But they haven’t been able to definitively experimentally demonstrate the presence of superionic water in the diamond mixture.
In addition to confirming earlier findings, the new experiments also open up prospects for custom production of nanoscale diamonds. The diamond can be used in abrasives and polishing agents, and in the future for highly sensitive quantum sensors, medical contrast agents, and high-efficiency reaction accelerators.Intern reporter Zhang Jiaxin
[Editor-in-chief’s circle]
A planet with a “diamond rain” inside? It sounds like a fantasy, but it turns out to be a real cosmic wonder. Black holes that rotate “dancing”, pulsars that have an extremely precise “sense of time”, and asteroids that “walk around” in space, the magic and grace of the universe refreshes our cognition time and time again. But what is certain is that the universe that humans understand is still just the tip of its iceberg. Today, the ability of human beings to directly detect the universe is becoming stronger and stronger, and the experimental simulation methods are becoming more and more diverse, and more amazing cosmic wonders will break into human vision.
Manuscript link: http://tech.ce.cn/news/202209/05/t20220905_38083965.shtml
Responsible editor: gaoxuejing Liu Yuan