On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 in the morning, a terrible history took place in the state of New Mexico. The peace of dawn was shattered when the United States military detonated a plutonium explosive device known as the Gadget, the world’s first test of a nuclear bomb known as the Trinity. This moment would change the war forever.

The release of energy equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT vaporized the 30-meter (98 feet) test tower and the kilometers of copper wire connecting it to the recording equipment. The resulting fireball combined the tower and copper with the underlying asphalt and desert sand to form green glass, a new mineral called trinitite.

Decades later, scientists discovered the secret once thought impossible, hidden in a piece of trinitite, a rare form of the substance known as quasicrystalline.

“Quasicrystals form under extreme conditions that rarely exist on Earth,” geophysicist Terry Wallace of Los Alamos National Laboratory said in 2021. “They need a traumatic event that involves severe shock, heat and pressure. “We don’t usually see that except for a dramatic event like a nuclear explosion.”

Most crystals, from simple table salt to the hardest diamonds, follow the same rule: their atoms are arranged in a repeating lattice structure in three-dimensional space. Quasicrystals break this rule; The way its atoms are arranged is not repeated.

When this concept first appeared in the scientific world in 1984, it was thought to be impossible: crystals are either ordered or disordered, and there are no intermediate states. They were later found to have actually been created deep within meteorites, both in the laboratory and in the wild, created by thermodynamic shock from events such as supervelocity collisions.

Knowing that the production of quasicrystals requires extreme conditions, a team of scientists led by geologist Luca Bindi from the University of Florence in Italy decided to examine trinitite more closely.

But not the green stuff. Although they are rare, we have seen enough quasicrystals to know that they tend to contain metal; so the team began looking for a much rarer form of the mineral, red trinitite, given its hue due to embedded evaporated copper wires. inside.

They analyzed six small samples of red trinitite using techniques such as scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. They finally hit the nail on the head with one of the samples, an “unintended consequence” of the warmongering: a tiny 20-sided grain of silicon, copper, calcium and iron with fivefold rotational symmetry impossible for ordinary crystals.

“This quasicrystal is remarkable for its complexity, but so far no one can tell us why it forms this way,” Wallace explained when the team’s work was published in 2021.

“But one day some scientist or engineer will figure it out, the curtain will lift, and we will have a thermodynamic explanation for its creation. Then, hopefully, we can use this knowledge to better understand nuclear explosions and ultimately have a more complete understanding of what nuclear testing is all about.” We can lead to a picture.”

This discovery represents the oldest known anthropogenic quasicrystal and suggests that other natural pathways for quasicrystal formation may exist. For example, the source of quasicrystals in nature can be fulgurites obtained from molten sand hammered by lightning strikes and materials from meteorite impact sites.

The researchers believe the study may also help us better understand illegal nuclear testing aimed at deterring nuclear proliferation. Examination of minerals produced at other nuclear testing sites may reveal more quasicrystals whose thermodynamic properties could be a tool for nuclear forensics.

“Understanding other countries’ nuclear weapons requires a clear understanding of their nuclear testing programs,” Wallace said. “We normally analyze radioactive residue and gases to understand how the weapon was made or what materials it contained, but these traces decay. The quasicrystal formed at the site of the nuclear explosion could potentially provide us with new types of information and “will exist forever.” Source