Diamonds and plastic bottles
According to the Daily Mail, their technology could help reduce plastic waste, as recycled nano diamonds have a wide range of applications, for example in the production of medical sensors and drug delivery.
The researchers of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) in California intended to investigate the phenomenon of “diamond rain” that occurs in the planets Neptune and Uranus.
Inside these ice giants, the air temperature is several thousand degrees Celsius and the pressure is millions of times higher than the Earth’s atmosphere.
Such conditions are thought to help break down the hydrocarbon compounds, which then transform the carbon components into diamonds that sink deeper into the planets’ cores.
To simulate this process, scientists targeted polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a hydrocarbon material commonly used in disposable packaging, with a high-powered laser and watched as diamond-like structures grew.
Physicist Dominik Kraus says: polyethylene terephthalate provides a good balance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate activity on icy planets. We know that a mixture of compounds made of hydrogen and carbon exists about 5,000 miles below the surface of Uranus and Neptune. These materials include methane, a molecule consisting of one carbon bonded to four hydrogen atoms, which gives Neptune its distinctive blue color.
In a 2017 study, the Slack Lab team successfully simulated the diamond precipitation process for the first time by firing their optical laser at polystyrene. Polystyrene was also used to mimic the structure of methane, since this material only contains hydrogen and carbon.
The powerful X-rays created shock waves in the material, and the scientists observed that carbon atoms coalesced into tiny diamond structures.
Inside the planets, the situation is much more complicated, says Siegfried Glenzer, director of high energy density at Slack. There are many more chemicals in their composition. So what we wanted to find out here was what kind of effect these extra chemicals have.
These ice giants are thought to contain large amounts of oxygen in addition to carbon and hydrogen. Scientists wanted to discover how this element affects the formation of nano diamonds inside Neptune and Uranus.
To do this, they repeated their previous experiment with a film of polyethylene terephthalate plastic, which more accurately reproduces the composition of the planets.
They used a high-powered optical laser to heat the sample to a temperature of 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius). This created a shock wave that applied a million times atmospheric pressure to the material for a few nanoseconds.
Using a method called X-ray diffraction, scientists observed the rearrangement of atoms in the form of small diamonds and also measured their size and growth rate.
However, they found that with the presence of oxygen in the material, nano diamonds could grow at lower pressures and temperatures than previously observed.
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