الوضع الليلي
0
Completely New Form of Gold Created
4:47:16 2019-08-04 1527

Under extreme conditions, gold rearranges its atoms and forms a previously unknown structure. And when the pressures were pushed to the equivalent of those at the center of the Earth, the gold got even weirder.

 

The finding comes from a new study in which researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Carnegie Institution for Science practiced their 21st-century alchemy at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Using a high-energy laser, they heated gold to extreme temperatures and compressed it to pressures as high as those found at the center of the Earth.

 

More specifically, they put a little piece of plastic in front of a chunk of gold and then shot a high-energy laser through the plastic, which "basically causes an explosion that sends plastic one way and shock waves in the opposite direction," said lead author Richard Briggs, a postdoctoral scientist at LLNL.

 

Those shock waves hit the gold and caused it to compress and heat up extremely quickly, within nanoseconds. They then hit the gold with X-rays and detected where the x-rays bounced off in order to figure out its structure. This is "the first time that we've ever been able to reach such high-pressure and high-temperature conditions and look at them at the same time using X-rays," Briggs told Live Science. What they saw was "certainly a surprise."

 

Gold usually forms a crystalline structure that materials scientists call face-centered cubic (fcc). Imagine a cube like a die. Atoms would sit on each corner and each face, Briggs said. But most experiments conducted on gold have involved compressing it slowly and at room temperature, he added.

 

Because it so loyally forms this face-centered cubic structure, gold has been used as a kind of "standard" in high-pressure experiments to calculate pressure, Briggs said. But when Briggs and his team rapidly compressed the gold at high temperatures, it formed what's called the body-centered cubic (bcc) structure. This more-open structure packs atoms into a space in a less-efficient way, which means the gold doesn't prefer to be in this form, he said. If you were to imagine the die again, it would be as if atoms sat on each corner, with just one atom in the middle.

 

The finding that gold can form this new structure may change the way scientists use the element as a standard in high-pressure experiments, Briggs said.

 

The team found that the structure of gold began to change from fcc to bcc at around 220 gigapascals (GPa), which is 2.2 million times our planet's atmospheric pressure, the researchers said in a statement. What's more, when the researchers compressed the gold beyond 250 GPa to pressures equivalent to that found at the center of the Earth (around 330 GPa), it melted.

Foresight   2026-03-24
Reality Of Islam

MOST VIEWS

Importance of Media

9:3:43   2018-11-05

Illuminations

salih & the special camel

8:3:0   2018-06-21

al-hussain (peace be upon him)

10:18:1   2022-09-21

overcoming challenges

5:57:34   2023-03-18

true friendship

11:2:27   2022-10-06

pure nature

7:34:7   2023-02-28

be yourself

4:2:19   2022-10-10



IMmORTAL Words
LATEST Scientists Discover Exercise Can Match One Key Benefit of Sleep for the Brain MIT Engineers Create a Living Circuit Board from Bacteria Carbon Signature of Humanity Is Now Embedded Deep in the Ocean Valor in the Battle of the Confederates The Preparation and Burial of the Prophet (PBUH) Preventing Household Accidents for Children How Often You Exercise May Matter More Than How Hard You Work Out for Mental Health First Heat-Powered Cooling System in the world Turns Waste Heat into Cold This Utah Mountain Is Hiding Enough Ice to Fill 600 Olympic Pools The Demise of Fatima bint Asad A Covenant of Coexistence Between Muslims and Others What Will Become of the Future of a Difficult Child?