S&TR Preview: Smashing Materials to Reveal Unusual Behavior

Multimedia · Wed Jan 13 00:00:00 EST 2016

OSTI ID:1328749

Hunsberger, Maren; Akin, Minta; Chau, Ricky

Squeeze a material hard enough, and its structure and properties will change, sometimes dramatically so. With enough heat and pressure, scientists can turn pencil lead (graphite), one of Earth’s softest materials, into diamond, one of its hardest. Apply even more pressure—such as might be found in explosions, detonating nuclear weapons, laser fusion experiments, meteorite impacts, or the hearts of stars and planets—and materials can take stranger forms. Deep in Jupiter’s core, for instance, where pressures likely reach 50 to 100 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere, hydrogen is predicted to be a metallic liquid rather than the familiar transparent gas.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• OSTI ID: 1328749
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

38 RADIATION CHEMISTRY, RADIOCHEMISTRY, AND NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
SHOCK PHYSICS
MATTER
FUSION IGNITION
DYNAMIC COMPRESSION EXPERIMENTS