A new study reveals that lasers can turn a common plastic into tiny diamonds, an idea inspired by ice giants like Neptune and Uranus. Scientists have blasted cheap plastic into tiny “nanodiamonds” using ultrapowerful lasers in this process researchers have confirmed the existence of an exotic new type of water.
Plastic can be transformed into tiny diamonds by blasting it with powerful lasers. Similar processes may take place at the high temperatures and pressures found within planets, which could explain why Uranus and Neptune are so strange.
Previously, researchers were able to create nanodiamonds by shining lasers at a mixture of carbon and hydrogen, but it required extremely high pressures.
Siegfried Glenzer of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California and his colleagues discovered that they could make diamonds in much less extreme conditions by using a simple plastic called PET, which is commonly used to make bottles and other containers and contains carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
Experiment turning plastic into tiny diamonds:
When they fired a powerful laser at the plastic, it heated up to temperatures ranging from 3200°C to 5800°C, and the shock waves generated by the laser pulse increased the pressure to 72 gigapascals, which is one-fifth the pressure in Earth’s core. This separated the hydrogen and oxygen from the carbon, resulting in tiny diamonds a few nanometres across and superionic water, which conducts electricity more easily than regular water.
According to Glenzer, this occurred at lower pressures than in previous experiments using other materials, and the interiors of giant planets, like PET, contain oxygen as well as carbon and hydrogen.
The technique could also help to reduce plastic pollution by providing a financial incentive to remove and recycle plastics from the ocean.
The discoveries may also have commercial applications. At the moment, people make nanodiamonds by detonating carbon or blasting larger diamonds to bits with explosives, resulting in a jumble of different-sized diamonds.The new method would be a more sanitary way of producing diamonds of specific sizes.
