Tech

Materials cannot be made under extreme pressure


Researchers at Linköping University have, among other places, created a new material that shouldn’t have been possible. Its synthesis, however, was made possible thanks to a new method that generates pressures approximately three times higher than in the Earth’s core. The results have been published in the journal Nature.

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Chemical compounds and other materials change properties when they are exposed to high pressure and temperature. Diamond is one such example. It started out as organic carbon that for a long time was compressed by downward pressure inside the Earth. In a similar way, the researchers want to create new materials in the lab under even higher pressures to see what happens.

“According to our theoretical model, it is possible to detect completely new materials under pressures as high as one terapascal – that is, three times the pressure at the center of the Earth. But so far, technology has limited options,” said Igor Abrikosov, a professor at Linköping University and one of the lead authors of the new study published in the scientific journal Nature.

New material

The former maximum limit for synthesizing materials using, so-called high-pressure crystallography, was about 200 gigapascals. But thanks to rapid technical advances, Bayreuth University researchers, in collaboration with Linköping University, among others, have now developed a method that can generate new materials at a rate of 900 gigapascals.

“This is the first time that a material has been created at such high pressure in a laboratory. It opens the door to synthesizing many new materials that were previously thought to be possible only in theory,” says Abrikosov.

Using lasers and so-called two-stage diamond anvil cells, the researchers succeeded in making alloys with nitrogen and nitrogen gas and in synthesizing hydrogen nitride gas, Re7WOMEN3. This is the first time any material has existed in practice, outside of theoretical models. Natalia Durovinskaia is a professor at Bayreuth University and a guest professor in the Strategic Research Area in Advanced Functional Materials Materials Science at Linköping University, and she sees great potential:

“If we apply high-pressure crystallography in the terapascal range in the future, we can make even more surprising discoveries. “The doors are now open for innovative materials research to create and visualize unexpected structures under extreme conditions,” says Natalia Durovinskaia.

Extinguish

The next step of the research is to control the synthesis products at such high pressure. Many materials will break apart under pressure. But theory can identify which elements can be extinguished under ambient conditions. This will lead the way to using them in many applications. Just like how a diamond is made under high pressure in the Earth’s interior and becomes permanent, so materials that cannot be created in a lab and then quenched become permanent.

The study was funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science for Advanced Functional Materials at Linköping University, Swedish Government Strategic Research Area SeRC Center for Electronic Science, Swedish Research Council, Vinnova (Swedish Innovation Systems Agency) and Swedish Strategic Research Foundation.

Posts: Synthesis of materials at a static pressure of terapascal Leonid Dubrovinsky, Saiana Khandarkhaeva, Timofey Fedotenko, Dominique Laniel, Maxim Bykov, Carlotta Giacobbe, Eleanor Lawrence Bright, Pavel Sedmak, Stella Chariton, Vitali Prakapenka, Alena V. Ponomareva, Ekaterina A. Smirnova, Maxim N. Belasn Shulumba, Florian Trybel, Igor A. Abrikosov, Natalia Dubrovinskaia Nature 2022 doi: 10.1038 / s41586-022-04550-2

Footnotes at the bottom of the page: Pressure is measured in the SI unit pascal. It usually has a prefix, because a pascal is a small unit. One gigapascal is one billion pascals (109), and one terapascal is one thousand gigapascals (10twelfth).





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