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A laser blast produces miniature diamonds from plain-old plastic. That’s proper, the identical variety utilized in soda bottles.
When squeezed to about one million occasions Earth’s atmospheric strain and heated to 1000’s of levels Celsius, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, forms nanodiamonds, physicist Dominik Kraus and colleagues report September 2 in Science Advances.
Ice big planets, resembling Neptune and Uranus, have related temperatures, pressures and mixtures of chemical parts because the supplies within the examine, suggesting that diamonds might rain down in these planets’ interiors. What’s extra, the researchers say, the brand new approach may very well be used to fabricate nanodiamonds to be used in quantum units and different functions.
Within the new examine, researchers skilled lasers on samples of plastic. Every laser blast despatched a shock wave careening via the plastic, amping up the strain and temperature inside. Probing the fabric with bursts of X-rays revealed that nanodiamonds had shaped.
Earlier research had created diamonds by compressing compounds of hydrogen and carbon. However PET, which is usually utilized in foods and drinks packaging, incorporates not simply hydrogen and carbon but additionally oxygen. That makes it a greater match to the composition of ice big planets like Neptune and Uranus. The oxygen appears to help the diamond formation, says Kraus, of the College of Rostock in Germany. “The oxygen sucks out the hydrogen,” he says, forsaking carbon which may then type diamond.
Nanodiamonds are generally produced utilizing explosives, Kraus says, a course of not straightforward to manage. The brand new approach might create nanodiamonds which are extra simply tailor-made for explicit makes use of, resembling quantum devices made using diamond with defects the place, for instance, nitrogen atoms change a number of the carbon atoms (SN: 7/6/18).
“The concept is sort of cool. You are taking water bottle plastic; you zap it with a laser to make diamond. How sensible it’s, I don’t know,” says physicist Marius Millot of Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory in California, who was not concerned with the brand new examine. How simply the diamonds may very well be recovered is unclear, he says. However, “it’s fairly neat to consider the concept.”
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