A laser blast produces miniature diamonds from plain-old plastic. That’s proper, the identical sort utilized in soda bottles.
When squeezed to about one million instances Earth’s atmospheric strain and heated to hundreds of levels Celsius, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, varieties nanodiamonds, physicist Dominik Kraus and colleagues report September 2 in Science Advances.
Ice big planets, akin to Neptune and Uranus, have comparable temperatures, pressures and combos of chemical parts because the supplies within the examine, suggesting that diamonds could rain down in these planets’ interiors. What’s extra, the researchers say, the brand new method might be used to fabricate nanodiamonds to be used in quantum gadgets and different purposes.
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In the brand new examine, researchers educated lasers on samples of plastic. Each laser blast despatched a shock wave careening by way of the plastic, amping up the strain and temperature inside. Probing the fabric with bursts of X-rays revealed that nanodiamonds had fashioned.
Previous research had created diamonds by compressing compounds of hydrogen and carbon. But PET, which is usually utilized in food and drinks packaging, accommodates not simply hydrogen and carbon but in addition 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 University of Rostock in Germany. “The oxygen sucks out the hydrogen,” he says, abandoning carbon which might then kind diamond.
Nanodiamonds are generally produced utilizing explosives, Kraus says, a course of not simple to manage. The new method might create nanodiamonds which might be extra simply tailor-made for explicit makes use of, akin to quantum gadgets made utilizing diamond with defects the place, for instance, nitrogen atoms substitute a few of the carbon atoms (SN: 7/6/18).
“The idea is quite cool. You take water bottle plastic; you zap it with a laser to make diamond. How practical it is, I don’t know,” says physicist Marius Millot of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who was not concerned with the brand new examine. How simply the diamonds might be recovered is unclear, he says. But, “it’s pretty neat to think about the idea.”