Overview
- Researchers reported Monday in PNAS the first crystallographically confirmed clathrate formed by a nuclear explosion.
- The crystal was found inside a copper-rich droplet embedded in red trinitite, the glass made when the 1945 Trinity blast melted desert sand mixed with vaporized tower metals.
- It formed under a brief burst of extreme heat, pressure, and rapid cooling, creating a metastable phase that current laboratory techniques cannot reproduce.
- The team from the University of Florence, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and the Slovak Academy of Sciences used nanoscale tomography and single-crystal X-ray diffraction to resolve its 3D structure.
- The lattice features silicon cages with 12 and 14 faces and includes calcium, copper, and iron, and the authors say links to a 2021 Trinity-site quasicrystal remain unclear as they continue to search for more rare phases.