Now, a team of laboratory researchers have devised a technique, which they claim could squeeze materials to pressures 100 to 1,000 times greater than achievable today. It could replicate the same conditions that are expected in the cores of supergiant planets. This has been made possible by combining diamond anvils and powerful lasers. Till today, these pressures have only been accessible experimentally next to underground nuclear explosions.
Jeanloz and his team have accomplished pressures close to 10 million atmospheres using the 30 kilojoule ultraviolet Omega laser at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics in New York. They have plans to achieve more than a billion atmospheres of pressure using the 2 megajoule laser of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility. Jeanloz said:
With the development of techniques to reach high pressures, scientists are discovering an entirely new realm of chemistry. We want to be able to understand the hundreds of planets that have now been found that are massive enough that their central pressures are many hundreds of millions of atmospheres, and maybe a billion atmospheres.
Well, a minuscule sample is compressed between the tips of two diamonds in the diamond anvil. During the process, many powerful lasers are focused at one of diamonds, thereby vaporizing it and driving a shock wave through the sample that compresses it further. The sample is compressed for 1 to 2 nanoseconds, which is more than enough time for the scientists to study the properties of the sample (e.g. the stuff of stars and giant planets).
Via: Dvorak
