A team including researcher Arturas Vailionis of SLAC and Stanford blasted tiny bits of sapphire with a new table-top laser device that penetrates crystals and sets off micro-explosions inside them, creating powerful shock waves that compress the surrounding material. Under these extreme conditions – terapascals of pressure and temperatures of 100,000 Kelvin – warm dense matter forms, the state of matter between a solid and a plasma.
Because sapphire is a form of aluminum oxide, or alumina, researchers expected to find evidence of various phases of high-pressure alumina inside the gem. Instead, they observed minuscule amounts of a surprisingly stable, highly-compressed form of elemental aluminum called body-centered cubic aluminum.
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