A laser blast produces miniature diamonds from plain-old plastic. That’s proper, the identical type utilized in soda bottles.
When squeezed to about 1,000,000 instances Earth’s atmospheric stress 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, reminiscent of Neptune and Uranus, have related temperatures, pressures and combos 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 might be used to fabricate nanodiamonds to be used in quantum units and different purposes.
Within the new examine, researchers educated lasers on samples of plastic. Every laser blast despatched a shock wave careening via the plastic, amping up the stress 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 often utilized in food and drinks packaging, comprises 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 College 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 straightforward to manage. The brand new approach might create nanodiamonds which might be extra simply tailor-made for specific makes use of, reminiscent of quantum units made utilizing diamond with defects the place, for instance, nitrogen atoms change among the carbon atoms (SN: 7/6/18).
“The concept is kind 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 might be recovered is unclear, he says. However, “it’s fairly neat to consider the thought.”
