What can you do with an ordinary plastic bottle Make diamonds And simulate Uranus
An international team led by the Helmholtz Centre for Research Dresden Rosendorf (HZDR), Germany, the University of Rostock and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, recently conducted a new experiment to determine what is happening inside icy planets such as Neptune and Uranus. Using laser flashes to simulate the interiors of icy planets, they have advanced a new process for producing microscopic diamonds (also called diamonds) that are essential for quantum sensors. The research paper has been published in the journal Science Advances [1].
The researchers fired a laser at a simple PET plastic film and used an intense laser flash to study what happened. One result is that the researchers were able to confirm that "diamond showers" do exist inside ice giants in the outer reaches of the solar system. The method could establish a new way to produce nanodiamonds, for example, needed for highly sensitive quantum sensors.
Conditions inside icy giants such as Neptune and Uranus are extreme: temperatures reach thousands of degrees Celsius and pressures are millions of times higher than those of Earth's atmosphere. Nevertheless, such states can be simply simulated in the laboratory: a powerful laser flash hits a sample of thin-film material, instantly heating it to 6,000°C and generating a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times its atmospheric pressure.
Ice giant
Dominik Kraus, HZDR physicist and professor at the University of Rostock, said [2], "So far, we have used hydrocarbon films for this type of experiment. We found that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds, called nanodiamonds."
Using these films, however, can only partially simulate the interior of a planet, since ice giants contain not only carbon and hydrogen, but also large amounts of oxygen. In searching for a suitable material for the films, the team found an everyday substance: PET, a resin used to make ordinary plastic bottles.
PET has a good balance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and can simulate the activity of an ice giant," Kraus said. The team conducted the experiments at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, home to the Linear Accelerator Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful accelerator-based X-ray laser. They used it to analyze what happens when an intense laser flash hits a PET film, while using two measurements: X-ray diffraction to determine if nanodiamonds are produced, and so-called small-angle scattering to observe the rate and size of diamond growth. The role of oxygen is to accelerate the splitting of carbon and hydrogen, thus facilitating the formation of nanodiamonds. This means that carbon atoms are more likely to bond and form diamonds."
This further supports the hypothesis that diamond showers exist inside ice giants. These findings may be relevant not only to Uranus and Neptune, but also to the myriad of other planets in our galaxy. Although these ice giants were considered rare in the past, it now appears that they may be the most common planets outside of our solar system.
The team also got another hint: In combination with diamonds, water should be produced - but in an unusual variant. "What is called superionic water may have formed," Kraus noted, "with oxygen atoms forming a lattice in which hydrogen nuclei move freely."
Because these nuclei are electrically charged, superionic water conducts an electric current, which helps generate the magnetic field of an ice giant. However, in their experiments, it has not been possible to definitively prove the presence of superionic water in the diamond mixture. They plan to study this issue further.
The experiment also opens up the prospect of a technological application: the custom production of nano-sized diamonds. In the future, they are expected to be used as highly sensitive quantum sensors, medical contrast agents and efficient reaction gas pedals, for example for the decomposition of carbon dioxide.
Nanodiamonds
Kraus explains, "Until now, such diamonds have been produced mainly by detonating explosives; with the help of laser flashes, they could be produced more cleanly in the future." The scientists envision a process in which a high-performance laser fires a flash of light ten times per second at a PET film, which is irradiated by the beam at intervals of 1/10th of a second. The resulting nanodiamonds are shot out of the film and land in a collection tank filled with water. There, they are slowed down, then filtered and efficiently harvested.
The main advantage of this method over explosive production is that "the nanodiamonds can be tailored to size and even doped with other atoms," says Kraus. "The X-ray laser means we have a laboratory tool that can precisely control the growth of the diamonds. "
Reference link：
[1]https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo0617
[2]https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/09/crushed-plastic-bottles-could-create-nanodiamonds-for-quantum-sensors/
