Paper in PNAS identifies a never-before-seen clathrate crystal inside trinitite, the glassy material left by the 1945 Trinity nuclear test.
Key Takeaways
The clathrate has cage structures of silicon atoms (dodecahedrons and tetrakaidecahedrons) trapping calcium, copper, and iron – formed under temps above 1,500C and pressures of several gigapascals.
The same trinitite sample previously yielded a quasicrystal (2021); both structures share the same four elements: iron, silicon, copper, calcium.
Copper availability appears to determine which structure forms: copper-rich zones produced the quasicrystal, copper-scarce zones produced the clathrate.
Neither structure has been reproduced in a lab; they are metastable nonequilibrium phases that required the extreme, rapid-cooling conditions of a nuclear blast.
Authors frame high-energy events – nuclear detonations, lightning strikes, hypervelocity impacts – as natural laboratories for novel crystalline matter.
