Making nanodiamonds out of bottle plastic

An international team fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes.

The high-performance laser fires ten flashes per second at a PET film, which is illuminated by the beam at intervals of a tenth of a second. It heats the film up to 6,000 degrees Celsius for the blink of an eye and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure.

The nanodiamonds thus created shoot out of the film and land in a collecting tank filled with water.

One result was that the researchers were able to confirm that it really does rain diamonds inside the ice giants (Neptune and Uranus) at the periphery of our solar system. And another was that this method could establish a new way of producing nanodiamonds, which are needed, for example, for highly-sensitive quantum sensors.