{"id":148195,"date":"2022-10-14T19:23:11","date_gmt":"2022-10-15T00:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/researchers-resolve-decades-long-debate-about-shock-compressed-silicon-with-unprecedented-detail"},"modified":"2022-10-14T19:23:11","modified_gmt":"2022-10-15T00:23:11","slug":"researchers-resolve-decades-long-debate-about-shock-compressed-silicon-with-unprecedented-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/researchers-resolve-decades-long-debate-about-shock-compressed-silicon-with-unprecedented-detail","title":{"rendered":"Researchers resolve decades-long debate about shock-compressed silicon with unprecedented detail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-resolve-decades-long-debate-about-shock-compressed-silicon-with-unprecedented-detail3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Silicon, an element abundant in Earth\u2019s crust, is currently the most widely used semiconductor material and is important in fields like engineering, geophysics and plasma physics. But despite decades of studies, how the material transforms when hit with powerful shockwaves has been a topic of longstanding debate.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne might assume that because we have already studied <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/silicon\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">silicon<\/a> in so many ways there is nothing left to discover,\u201d said Silvia Pandolfi, a researcher at the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. \u201cBut there are still some important aspects of its behavior that are not clear.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now, researchers at SLAC have finally put this controversy to rest, providing the first direct, high-fidelity view of how a single silicon crystal deforms during shock compression on nanosecond timescales. To do so, they studied the crystal with X-rays from SLAC\u2019s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser. The team published their results in <i>Nature Communications<\/i> on September 21st. What they learned could lead to more accurate models that better predict what will happen to certain materials in <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/extreme+conditions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">extreme conditions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Silicon, an element abundant in Earth\u2019s crust, is currently the most widely used semiconductor material and is important in fields like engineering, geophysics and plasma physics. But despite decades of studies, how the material transforms when hit with powerful shockwaves has been a topic of longstanding debate. \u201cOne might assume that because we have already [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}