15December 2022 ESRFnews

FUNCTIONAL MATERIALS

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ID11 beamline were not only energetic enough to penetrate the resultant ultra-dense material, but had such low emittance that they could be diffracted clearly from a spot less than half a micron wide (Nature 605 274). Indeed, the ESRF has been pioneering extreme- conditions research since the 1990s, and with the EBS upgrade has been pushing it to new frontiers. The refurbished ID27 beamline is dedicated to high- pressure and high-temperature experiments, for instance, while the refurbished ID24 beamline is now home to the high-power laser facility (HPLF), which will blast samples with a laser of 100 J of energy to induce dynamic compression up to terapascal pressures and

temperatures up to several tens of thousands of kelvin. Although the HPLF has only just begun to welcome users, there is the potential for it to synthesise super-hard ceramics, or to study the properties of unusual materials such as metallic glasses under extreme conditions. Already, ESRF users exploiting the new EBS source

are glimpsing materials that physicists and chemists have been hankering after for decades. More than 30 years ago, theorists at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US, predicted that carbon and nitrogen ought to be able to form covalent solids with a structure composed of corner-sharing CN4 tetrahedra as hard as, or harder than, diamond. In pursuit of such solids,

Extreme synthesis