Nanostars produced from 100 kilometer per second impacts of carbon buckyballs using a tabletop device

Dr. Bae gave an oral presentation and a poster presentation with Los Alamos National Lab on “Creating Nanostars with Buckyballs (C60)” at APS-SCCM Conference on July 8th and 9th.

Nanostars have been created and studied at Y. K. Bae Corp. by impacting buckyballs (C60) at hypervelocities (velocity over 100 km/s) in an innovative tabletop apparatus under the auspice of DTRA. The Nanostars are estimated to have ~10 TPa (100 million atmosphere pressure) transient pressures and convert ~35 % of impact kinetic energy into soft-x-ray energy. The ultrahigh-efficiency conversion is proposed to result from Dicke Superradiance of Metastable Innershell Molecular State (MIMS), originally discovered by Dr. Bae and his colleagues in 1994 at Brookhaven National Lab with the use of a large particle accelerator. The innovative usage of buckyballs and successful orders-of-magnitude scaling down of the apparatus size and complexity establish an innovative tabletop method of generating and studying matters in planetary or stellar interiors and open doors to numerous unprecedented applications.

This work could lead to vastly more efficient generation of x-rays at higher intensities.

It could also lead to far more powerful explosives and the replacement of the fission trigger in nuclear fusion bombs. Fusion bombs without fission triggers would have almost zero nuclear fallout.

Covalent bonds have 2-9 electron volts
Hydrogen bond have 0.04 to 0.13 eV
kinetic energy of neutrons produced by D-T fusion, used to trigger fission is 14.1
Average total energy released in the nuclear fission of one uranium-235 atom is 215 MeV

The MIMS material produces keV x-rays. A few hundred times more than regular covalent bond energy. Thousands of times less than nuclear fusion and fission energy levels.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks