A collaboration between researchers from Germany, France, the USA, the United Kingdom, China, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland successfully characterized liquid carbon using X-ray diffraction.
The article “The structure of liquid carbon elucidated by in situ X-ray diffraction“, published in the journal Nature, presents the measured and simulated patterns obtained through the Density Functional Theory with Molecular Dynamics (DFT-MD) technique.
According to the authors, this could lead to progress in the study of “icy giant planets, the classification of exoplanets made of similar constituents, defining new processes of materials synthesis through extreme conditions, and designing the best ablator materials for inertial confinement fusion”.