Researchers Conduct a Novel Experiment That Can Turn PET Plastic Into Nanodiamonds

What happens inside planets such as Neptune and Uranus? An international team conducted a novel experiment to find out.

They used intense laser flashes to investigate what happened when they fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic.

As a result, the researchers were able to confirm their previous hypothesis that diamonds do indeed rain inside the ice giants on the outskirts of our solar system.

Another advantage was that this process might pave the way for a new method of generating nanodiamonds, which are required, for example, in very sensitive quantum sensors.

Plastics turning to nanodiamonds

(Photo : Edgar Soto/Unsplash)

Temperatures in the interiors of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus can reach thousands of degrees Celsius, and pressures are millions of times greater than in the Earth's atmosphere , as per ScienceDaily.

However, states like this can be briefly simulated in the lab: powerful laser flashes strike a film-like material sample, heat it up to 6,000 degrees Celsius in the blink of an eye, and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure.

"Previously, we employed hydrocarbon films for these kind of experiments," said Dominik Kraus, physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock.

They observed that this tremendous pressure formed nanodiamonds, which are microscopic diamonds.

However, because ice giants contain not just carbon and hydrogen, but also large amounts of oxygen, these films could only partially represent the interiors of planets.

When looking for a suitable film material, the researchers came across a common substance: PET, the resin used to make regular plastic bottles.

PET has a strong carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen balance to represent the activity in ice worlds, Kraus explains.

The trials were carried out at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, which houses the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful accelerator-based X-ray laser.

They utilized it to investigate what occurs when intense laser flashes strike a PET film, applying two measuring methods simultaneously: X-ray diffraction to detect if nanodiamonds were generated and small-angle scattering to assess how quickly and how large the diamonds grew.

According to Dominik Kraus, who reported the findings, oxygen accelerated the splitting of carbon and hydrogen, encouraging the production of nanodiamonds.

It meant that carbon atoms could readily unite and create diamonds.

This lends credence to the notion that diamonds truly shower down on the ice giants.

The findings are likely to be applicable not only to Uranus and Neptune but to a plethora of other planets in our galaxy as well.

Read more: Bye, Chernobyl! Nuclear Waste Powered Diamond Batteries That Could Last A Lifetime

Nanodiamonds

Nanodiamonds (NDs) are particularly interesting for a variety of possible applications due to their superior mechanical and optical qualities, wide surface area, ease of bioconjugation, and high biocompatibility, as per ScienceDirect.

In recent years, NDs have received a lot of attention in nanomedicine, and some significant progress has been made.

This paper outlines the synthetic pathways and NDs' distinct features.

Furthermore, the current advancements of NDs in nanomedical applications, such as bioimaging, drug delivery, and biosensing, are reviewed.

Nanodiamonds (NDs) have been emphasized as a new class of carbon nanomaterials because they inherit the distinctive qualities of bulk diamonds such as low toxicity, persistent fluorescence, simple functionalization, inherent biocompatibility, and other basic properties.

Since the first ND synthesis in the 1960s, a vast number of ND research have been published during the last several decades.

NDs of varied shapes and sizes have been created using various synthesis techniques and are widely utilized in numerous disciplines, including tribology and lubrication, drug delivery, bioimaging, biosensor energy storage, catalysis, and photodevices.

Several key elements of NDs and their applications have already been addressed, but there have been few evaluations of NDs' current advancement in nanomedicine.

Related article: Miners from Angola Discover the Largest Pink Diamond Ever in 300 Years