BC8 super diamonds, which are harder than any known material, are believed to exist only in the cores of giant exoplanets. However, the Frontier supercomputer has uncovered the key to their formation, a breakthrough that could potentially allow for their production on Earth. Diamonds are not only renowned for their stunning appearance in jewellery but also play a crucial role in various applications globally. As the hardest known substance and due to their distinctive properties, diamonds are utilized in diverse fields, ranging from drilling advanced geothermal wells to functioning as semiconductors in nuclear batteries.

Figure 1. World's Fastest Supercomputer Derives Recipe for Otherworldly Diamond.

Now, consider the possibilities if we could develop a substance even stronger than the hardest material known to humanity. In fact, scientists have envisioned this for years. They predict that a material containing eight carbon atoms for every four found in a diamond likely exists under the extreme heat and pressure present in the cores of planets at least twice the size of Earth.

Creating this "superdiamond," known as BC8 (for eight-atom body-cantered cubic), might be achievable in the lab, but replicating the necessary conditions is incredibly challenging. To produce BC8, a replicator would need to generate pressures 10 million times greater than Earth's atmosphere and temperatures nearing those of the sun's surface, making multiple physical experiments to attempt its production somewhat impractical.[1]

Enter Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Lab. It has the capability to run millions of atomic modelling scenarios under various conditions to pinpoint the exact requirements for forming BC8. A research team led by Ivan Oleynik, the study’s lead author and a physics professor at the University of South Florida, received permission to use Frontier to help solve the BC8 puzzle—and their efforts proved successful.

Philosopher's stone

"It's the ultimate challenge in high-pressure physics," Oleynik remarked. "It's our equivalent of the philosopher’s stone that medieval alchemists dreamed would transform lead into gold—except the alchemists didn’t have Frontier." The professor and his team provided Frontier with an enormous amount of data to train a software module called LAMMPS, which stands for Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator. This module was crucial for carrying out the necessary computations. Oleynik noted that other computers were simply too slow to run the program effectively.

"We essentially mapped every atomic environment around each atom in a billion-atom system that could emerge under extreme pressures and temperatures," Oleynik explained. "This would have been impossible without Frontier." "For this study, we needed to simulate over a billion atoms and perform up to a million-time steps in molecular dynamics simulations," he added. "We had access to other supercomputers, but none had the computational power required to handle that many atoms."[2]

'Shocking' discovery

After running LAMMPS for approximately 24 hours using 8,000 of Frontier’s more than 9,400 nodes, the team discovered a unique and somewhat unexpected requirement for converting carbon into BC8. They found that traditional diamonds must first melt before the carbon liquid can rearrange itself into BC8’s super-strong structure.

"It’s a new discovery in that it contrasts with most cases where materials transform from one crystalline phase to another through a direct rearrangement of atomic structures," Oleynik noted. "The carbon bonds in diamonds are so strong that we need to melt the diamond to transition it into the BC8 crystalline phase. This adds another layer of complexity, requiring even more extreme conditions—12 million times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures of 5,000 K, which are close to the surface temperature of the sun."

The research indicated that these conditions could be achieved through a series of shockwaves and provided the team with the precise level of shockwaves needed to reach the required temperature and pressure for BC8 formation. The team is now testing this knowledge by attempting to synthesize BC8 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility, a massive nuclear fusion lab that uses 192 powerful lasers to generate temperatures exceeding 180 million degrees Fahrenheit and pressures over 100 billion times that of Earth's atmosphere.

References:

1. https://newatlas.com/materials/supercomputer-bc8-diamond/
2. https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/supercomputer-cracks-mystery-of-how-to-make-super-diamond-384935

Cite this article:

Gokila G (2024), World's Fastest Supercomputer Derives Recipe for Otherworldly Diamond, AnaTechMaz, pp. 35