An 'Impossible' Quasicrystal Was Forged in The World's First Nuclear Bomb Test. At 5:29 am on the morning of 16 July 1945, in the state of New Mexico, a dreadful slice of history was made.
The dawn calm was torn asunder as the United States Army detonated a plutonium implosion device known as the Gadget - the world's very first test of a nuclear bomb, known as the Trinity test. This moment would change warfare forever.
The energy release, equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, vaporized the 30-metre test tower (98 ft) and miles of copper wires connecting it to recording equipment. The resulting fireball fused the tower and copper with the asphalt and desert sand below into green glass - a new mineral called trinitite.
Decades later, scientists have discovered a secret hidden in a piece of that trinitite - a rare form of matter known as a quasicrystal, once thought to be impossible.
"Quasicrystals are formed in extreme environments that rarely exist on Earth," explained geophysicist Terry Wallace of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"They require a traumatic event with extreme shock, temperature, and pressure. We don't typically see that, except in something as dramatic as a nuclear explosion."
Most crystals, from the humble table salt to the toughest diamonds, obey the same rule: their atoms are arranged in a lattice structure that repeats in three-dimensional space. Quasicrystals break this rule - the pattern in which their atoms are arranged does not repeat.
When the concept first emerged in the scientific world in 1984, this was thought to be impossible: crystals were either ordered or disordered, with no in-between. Then they were actually found, both created in laboratory settings and in the wild - deep inside meteorites, forged by thermodynamic shock from events like a hypervelocity impact. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
