This unique video captures a never-before-seen event caught by the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. A team of scientists have used an X-ray laser to record the microscopic motion and effects of shock waves rippling across diamond in order to better explore the physics behind star explosions.
A better understanding of massive star explosions could help the researchers better understand fusion energy and help improve scientific models used to study these phenomena.
“What is really exciting is that we can capture images of what happens on microscopic scales,” said Bob Nagler, a staff scientist at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. “People have used X-rays to produce images of shock waves, but never on the tiny scale that LCLS makes possible.”
The team was able to measure the shock wave properties so clearly at this scale (down to one-thousandth of a meter). Watch the video and see for yourself.
How they did it
The researchers used a powerful optical laser pulse to trigger shock waves in thin, inch-long slivers of diamond. Then they zapped the diamonds with LCLS X-ray pulses at time intervals of hundreds of trillionths of a second, or hundreds of picoseconds. As you may have guessed, these powerful blasts destroyed each of the diamond samples used so they went through quite a few diamonds in the course of their experiment.
The team then took all of their images from the experiment and made a visually appealing movie with the X-ray images. The ultra-slow-motion “movie” (about 3 billionths of a second long) shows how a shock wave whips through the diamond faster than the speed of sound.
“LCLS’ pulses, just 50 quadrillionths of a second long, ‘freeze’ the motion of this elastic wave as it’s propagating through the material,” said Andreas Schropp, staff scientist at Germany’s DESY lab.The researchers used an X-ray technique called magnified phase-contrast imaging to translate density changes in diamond into vivid, high-resolution shock wave images.
The experiment gave the scientists more information about the compression of a diamond’s structure and the pressure changes caused by the shock wave.
