Tag: Diamonds

Dark Matter Mineralogy and Future Computers of Induced Crystal Flaws

[Image: Mexico’s “Cave of the Crystals,” via Wikipedia].

I guess I’ve got minerals on the brain.

Anyway, there was an amazing story last week suggesting that, deep inside the planet, minerals might exhibit flaws associated with “collisions with dark matter.” In a sense, this would make the entire interior of the earth a de facto dark matter detector—or, according to researchers at the University of Michigan, “minerals such as halite (sodium chloride) and zabuyelite (lithium carbonate), can act as ready-made detectors.”

Proving this hypothesis sounds like the opening scene of a blockbuster science fiction film: “An experiment could extract the minerals—which can be around 500 million years old—from kilometres-deep boreholes that already exist for geological research and oil prospecting. Physicists would need to crack open the extracted minerals and scan the exposed surfaces under an electron or atomic force microscope for the tracks made by recoiling nuclei. They could also use X-ray or ultraviolet 3D scanners to study bigger chunks of minerals faster, but with lower resolution.”

Either way, it’s incredible to imagine that slightly altered mineral structures deep inside the planet might reveal the presence of dark matter washing through the cosmos. After all, the Earth is allegedly “constantly crashing through huge walls of dark matter,” so the idea that some rocks might be glitched and scratched by these impacts isn’t that hard to believe. In fact, this brings to mind another hypothesis, that the GPS satellite network is, in fact, a huge, accidental dark matter detector.

Read more at Nature.

Meanwhile, ScienceDaily reported earlier this month that flaws deliberately introduced into the crystal forms of diamonds could be structured such that they improve those diamonds’ capacity for quantum computation. Apparently, a team at Princeton has designed new kinds of diamonds “that contain defects capable of storing and transmitting quantum information for use in a future ‘quantum internet.’”

There is obviously no connection between these two stories, but that won’t stop me from imagining some vast new quantum computer network, coextensive with the Earth’s interior, performing prime-number calculations along dark matter-induced crystal flaws, crooked mineral veins flashing in the darkness with data, like some buried circuitboard throbbing beneath the continents and seas.

Read more at ScienceDaily.

(Related: Planet Harddrive.)

Speculative Mineralogy

[Image: An otherwise unrelated image of crystal twinning, via Geology IN].

It’s hard to resist a headline like this: writing for Nature, Shannon Hall takes us inside “the labs that forge distant planets here on Earth.”

This is the world of exogeology—the geology of other planets—“a research area that is bringing astronomers, planetary scientists and geologists together to explore what exoplanets might look like, geologically speaking. For many scientists, exogeology is a natural extension of the quest to identify worlds that could support life.”

To understand how other planets are made, exogeologists are synthesizing those planets in miniature in the earthbound equipment in their labs. Think of it as an extreme example of landscape modeling. “To gather information to feed these models,” Hall writes, “geologists are starting to subject synthetic rocks to high temperatures and pressures to replicate an exoplanet’s innards.”

Briefly, it’s easy to imagine an interesting jewelry line—or architectural materials firm—using fragments of exoplanets in their work, crystals grown as representations of other worlds embedded in your garden pavement. Or fuse the ashes of your loved ones with fragments of hypothetical exoplanets. “Infinite memorialization,” indeed.

In any case, recall that, back in 2015, geologist Robert Hazen “predict[ed] that Earth has more than 1,500 undiscovered minerals and that the exact mineral diversity of our planet is unique and could not be duplicated anywhere in the cosmos.” As Hazen claimed, “Earth’s mineralogy is unique in the cosmos.” If we are, indeed, living in mineralogically unique circumstances, then this would put an end to the fantasy of finding a geologically “Earth-like” planet. But the search goes on.

This is not the only example of producing hypothetical mineral models of other worlds. In 2014, for example, ScienceDaily reported that “scientists for the first time have experimentally re-created the conditions that exist deep inside giant planets, such as Jupiter, Uranus and many of the planets recently discovered outside our solar system.” Incredibly, this included compressing diamond to a concentration denser than lead, using a giant laser.

Other worlds, produced here on Earth. Exoplanetary superdiamonds.

Read more over at Nature.

(Nature article spotted via Nathalia Holt).