AmericaThe Frontier supercomputer’s lightning-fast computing power helped experts figure out the conditions needed to produce the superhard BC8 diamond.
Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer located at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, helped decode the formation of BC8 – a super diamond harder than any material known to man, New Atlas July 30 news.
University of South Florida physics professor Ivan Oleynik’s team used Frontier to figure out how to produce BC8, which is thought to exist only in the cores of giant exoplanets, right here on Earth. The new study was published in the journal The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
As the hardest substance on Earth, diamond has been used not only as a stunning piece of jewelry but also for a wide range of applications, from drilling geothermal wells to acting as a semiconductor in nuclear batteries. BC8 promises to be even more useful, being harder than regular diamond. However, scientists speculate that the material can only exist under the extreme temperatures and pressures found in the cores of planets at least twice the size of Earth.
Creating BC8 superdiamonds is possible in the lab, but requires simulating challenging conditions. The simulation system would need to reach pressures 10 million times that of Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures close to the surface of the Sun. Therefore, conducting many of the physical experiments to test BC8 production is quite impractical.
The Frontier supercomputer is capable of running millions of atomic modeling scenarios across millions of sets of conditions to determine exactly what it takes to create BC8. Other computers are too slow to run the program, Oleynik said.
“For this research, we needed to simulate more than 1 billion atoms while performing up to 1 million time steps in molecular dynamics simulations. We had access to several other supercomputers, but none had the computing power to handle so many atoms,” Oleynik said.
Thousands of chips and cooling pipes inside the Frontier supercomputer. Photo: ORNL
After running the LAMMPS software module for about 24 hours on 8,000 of Frontier’s more than 9,400 nodes (a node is a single computer or a server), the team discovered a unique and surprising step in turning carbon into BC8: Traditional diamond had to be melted before the carbon solution could rearrange itself into the super-strong BC8 structure.
“The carbon bonds that make up diamond are so strong, we need to melt the diamond to turn it into the new BC8 crystal phase. This adds another requirement to the process with even more extreme pressures and temperatures – 12 million times the Earth’s atmospheric pressure and temperatures of around 4,700 degrees Celsius, close to the surface temperature of the Sun,” Oleynik said. Such conditions can be created through a series of shock waves.
The team is now testing their new information by attempting to synthesize BC8 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s NIF facility, a stadium-sized nuclear fusion facility that uses 192 powerful laser beams to generate temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures exceeding 100 billion atmospheres.
“Thanks to Frontier, we have a high chance of success. It is still a huge challenge with no guarantees, but we are very confident in the results,” Oleynik shared.