<i>Quasicrystals – materials that are somewhere in between an amorphous material and a crystal – are often created in extreme conditions. And where can you find a place more extreme than the place where an atomic bomb exploded?</i>
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Quasicrystals are solid materials with an orderly structure that separates them from amorphous materials. But, compared to plain old crystals they do not have a periodic structure. The first quasicrystal was discovered in 1982 by an Israeli material scientist Daniel Šechtman who now works for Technion. Back then, many considered it problematic as their structure was considered unreal. But, since then we discovered and synthesized many quasicrystals – some with very exotic elements in them and Šechtman got the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2011.
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In the meantime, a quasicrystal hunter Paul Steinhardt from Princeton and his coworkers discovered naturally occurring quasicrystals in the meteoric material from Chukotka. Steinhardt thinks these quasicrystals were created very long ago during an asteroid collision in the still young Solar system. Similarly, some of the quasicrystals we created in laboratories were also created when materials collided at high speeds. But there seem to be more ways to create them.
So, Steinhardt and his team decided to search for quasicrystals in the place where the first-ever nuclear test of human history took place. They were interested in whether the shockwaves and other extreme factors of a nuclear explosion can create a quasicrystal. The American test known as Trinity happened on the 16th of July 1945 at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. The researchers got to study a large area covered in a glassy material called trinitite.
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Back then, a 20 kiloton plutonium atomic bomb exploded in Alamogordo. It was placed on the top of a 30-meter tower and the explosion not only melted the tower but also the surrounding sand. That’s how the trinitite with reddish admixtures got created and Steinhardt thought this could be the perfect place to search for quasicrystals. This is because they are often made of unusual mixtures of different elements and trinitite created by the brutal explosion was just asking to hide some.
So, they searched, cut, and studied the trinitite for ten months until they found a small grain of a material that was later discovered to be a quasicrystal. It is made from iron, silicon, copper, and calcium. It seems to have been created from the molten desert sand that absorbed the tower's material – mostly its copper wires. And as it is common with quasicrystals the structure is similar to alloys. So it is a metal-like material made from positively charged ions surrounded by a sea of electrons.
<h4>Sources:</h4>
* https://www.pnas.org/content/118/22/e2101350118
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