ADECADES-LONG QUEST TO FIND quasicrystals – a crystal-like material with a seemingly impossible structure – has led researchers to an unlikely location: the site of the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb blast. When the US military detonated a plutonium bomb over the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, sand fused with copper cables that stretched to the top of the bomb’s detonation tower, forming a glassy mineral called red trinitite.
From a sample of this mineral, Luca Bindi, PhD, a mineralogist at the University of Florence in Italy, and his colleagues were able to isolate a previously undiscovered, could shed light on how these unusual grains form. It’s the oldest anthropogenic quasicrystal found yet.
