The lightning-fast computational abilities of the Frontier supercomputer are assisting experts in determining the necessary conditions for producing BC8 superhard diamonds.
Frontier, the fastest supercomputer in the world, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, is helping to decode the formation of BC8 – a super diamond harder than any material known to mankind, as reported by New Atlas on July 30.
The supercomputer is paving the way for the production of super diamonds. (Photo: New Atlas).
A research team led by Professor Ivan Oleynik from the University of South Florida is using Frontier to discover how to produce BC8, which is thought to only exist in the cores of giant exoplanets, right here on Earth. Their research has been published in the journal The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
As the hardest substance on Earth, diamonds are not only used for stunning jewelry but also have numerous applications, ranging from geothermal drilling to serving as semiconductors in nuclear batteries. BC8 promises to be even more useful due to its superior hardness compared to regular diamonds. However, scientists speculate that this material can only exist under extreme temperature and pressure conditions in the cores of planets that are at least twice the size of Earth.
Creating super diamond BC8 could be feasible in a laboratory setting, but it requires simulating incredibly challenging conditions. The simulation system will need to achieve pressures 10 million times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure and temperatures close to the surface temperature of the Sun. Therefore, conducting numerous physical experiments to test the production of BC8 is quite impractical.
The Frontier supercomputer is capable of running millions of atomic modeling scenarios across millions of condition sets to accurately determine what is needed to create BC8. Oleynik noted that other computers are too slow to run the program.
“For this research, we need to simulate over 1 billion atoms while performing up to 1 million time steps in molecular dynamics simulations. We accessed several other supercomputers, but none had the computational power to handle so many atoms,” Oleynik stated.
Thousands of chips and cooling water pipes inside the Frontier supercomputer. (Photo: ORNL)
After running the LAMMPS software module for about 24 hours using 8,000 of Frontier’s more than 9,400 nodes (a node is an individual computer or server), the research team discovered a unique and surprising step to transform carbon into BC8: traditional diamonds must be melted before the carbon solution can rearrange itself into the super-strong BC8 structure.
“The carbon bonds that make up diamond are very strong; we need to melt the diamond to convert it into a new BC8 crystalline phase. This adds another requirement to the process, with even more extreme pressures and temperatures – 12 million times the atmospheric pressure of Earth and temperatures around 4,700 degrees Celsius, nearly the surface temperature of the Sun,” Oleynik explained. Such conditions can be created through a series of shock waves.
The research team is now beginning to test the new information obtained by attempting to synthesize BC8 at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a large nuclear fusion facility equivalent to the size of a stadium, using 192 powerful laser beams to achieve temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures over 100 billion atmospheres.
“Thanks to Frontier, we have a high chance of success. This remains an incredibly challenging task with no guarantees, but we are very confident in the results,” Oleynik shared.
