The Beatles sang about someone called Lucy who was in the sky with diamonds and now scientists have discovered that you could turn plastic bottles into nanodiamonds with both feet planted safely on the ground.
A team from French and German researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostok and the École Polytechnique conducted an experiment in the hopes of learning more about the extreme conditions on Neptune and Uranus, the ice giant planets. On these worlds, their internal heat rises to thousands of degrees Celsius and the atmospheric pressure is millions of times greater than on our Earth.
Plastic to diamond process
Conducted at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, they used an accelerator-based X-ray laser called the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to fire very powerful laser flashes at a film of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic, which is the same material used to make plastic bottles and found that the shock waves produced small diamonds.
“We discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds.” said HZDR Physicist and University of Rostock professor Dominik Kraus.
The shock waves also compressed the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure on Earth.
The reason for choosing this plastic to perform the test on was because PET has a good balance of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen which makes it a good simulation of the interior of ice giant planets.
This research could help create a new way of producing nanodiamonds in industry such as in the form of nanometre-sized diamonds, which are used to manufacture abrasives and polishing agents.
“So far, diamonds of this kind have mainly been produced by detonating explosives,” Kraus explains.
“With the help of laser flashes, they could be manufactured more cleanly in the future. The X-ray laser means we have a lab tool that can precisely control the diamonds’ growth.”
It could rain diamonds on ice giants planets
Being that the materials of the PET plastic bottle simulate the interior of ice giant planets, what this experiment also supports is the theory that on ice giants planets such as Neptune and Uranus, it could actually rain diamonds.
The real question is, if Lucy is truly in the sky with diamonds, why isn’t she the one making it rain diamonds on these ice giant planets? Did The Beatles lie to us? Well in theory, they didn’t specify which sky Lucy occupied and being that space is full of undiscovered planets, this Lucy could still be out there somewhere waiting to be discovered.
Alongside the diamonds, scientists also believe that a unique form of water possessing a high level of electrical conductivity called “superionic water” would be produced. Further research will need to be conducted to confirm whether this is true or not.
What we do know is that we should be using stop using single-use plastics as they harm the environment so why not transform them into diamonds? Getting yourself some new bling while protecting the environment seems like a straightforward win-win.