One of my favourite books about physics is The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter by Paul Steinhardt. It chronicles how the physicist and his colleagues established the extra-terrestrial provenance of a mysterious quasicrystal sample and then trekked to its likely place of origin in the Siberian wilderness.
That sample was first identified by the Italian geologist Luca Bindi, who features throughout the book and specializes in the discovery of new minerals. I was delighted to see that Bindi has a new paper out that identifies a hitherto unknown material. That excitement was tempered by the fact that the alloy was created by the catastrophic nuclear explosion over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
On this day in 1945, an atomic bomb was detonated at 580 m over the city, creating a fireball where temperatures exceeded 7000 °C. As many as 140,000 people were killed by the bomb, which destroyed about 70% of the city’s buildings.
The fireball was a turbulent plasma of vapourized material from the city. This included building materials, metals, soil, water and, we mustn’t forget, some of the city’s residents. The plasma condensed rapidly creating glassy particles of micron–millimetre size that rained down on the Hiroshima area. These “hiroshimaite” particles mostly comprise of calcium, aluminium and silicon and can be found in the sandy beaches of Hiroshima Bay.
“The fireball left behind materials that never existed before,” says Bindi – who is based at the University of Florence. He adds that these hiroshimaites are helping scientists understand how matter behaves under extreme conditions – describing the fireball as a “giant accidental material-science laboratory”.
In this latest study, Bindi and colleagues in Italy, the US and Switzerland have identified a new metal alloy in a piece of hiroshimaite. The metallic grain is about one micron in size and is a homogenous mixture of six metals and silicon. X-ray diffraction shows that the alloy has an unusual crystal structure. This, along with the alloy’s high silicon content, make it a special material that has never been seen before.
According to Bindi, the alloy was formed by the condensation of a complex metallic vapour that was created by a range of materials that were caught up in the nuclear fireball. As the fireball cooled rapidy, a tiny droplet of metals and silicon condensed from the plasma. Then as the temperature dropped at an extraordinary rate, the droplet solidified and its metastable crystal structure was frozen in. This violent quenching prevented the alloy from evolving to a more common crystal structure.
This is not the first time that Bindi has found a new material in the debris of a nuclear explosion. A few years ago his was part of a team that discovered a quasicrystal in a piece of trinitite – glassy material that was created in July 1945 by the Trinity nuclear bomb test in New Mexico.
Bindi and colleagues report their results in Science Advances.
The post New material was created in Hiroshima nuclear explosion appeared first on Physics World.
The speed of laser light is due for a major upgrade after an international collaboration of scientists has developed a breakthrough nanomaterial. The new metasurface can steer and shape light beams at unprecedented speeds of just 74 quadrillionths of a second.
Scientists at UC Berkeley and Tel Aviv University revealed their new optical surface, developed in a Caltech lab, in a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology.
According to the team behind the breakthrough, their work will have ramifications for communications, sensing, imaging, and even quantum technologies, providing a new benchmark for “high-speed” light manipulation.
Since the fiber-optic advancements of the 1980s, lasers and light pulses have underpinned some of our most crucial cutting-edge technologies. Advanced computers, communications systems, sensors, and even the elusive quantum systems all rely on controlling light.
While the speed of light is so incredibly fast that physicists consider it a constraint on the maximum speed that matter can travel through the vacuum of space, the speed at which our technology reacts to it is far slower.
The scientists’ breakthrough metasurface contains silicon structures even smaller than the wavelength of light, resulting in an ultra-thin surface. Silicon’s optical properties change upon bombardment with laser pulses, a property that the team strongly enhanced with their nanostructure design. In their design, the properties of the material are modified via light pulses, which alter how the material influences a second beam of light impacting its surface. Notably, their metasurface allows for control of a beam of light without any moving parts, such as mirrors or lenses.
The team conducted laboratory tests in which they manipulated light beams by up to 13 degrees and reshaped them into different patterns.
“The key idea was to create a metasurface whose optical response is not fixed once it is fabricated,” said lead author Dr. Claudio Hail. “By changing the illumination pattern, we can reconfigure how the device steers and shapes light, and do so on an ultrafast timescale.”
“For me, the most exciting aspect is seeing an idea that had been with us for years become an experimental reality,” said co-author Dr. Lior Michaeli. “The ultrafast effect we wanted to use is naturally very weak. We had to design the metasurface so that it would amplify the effect enough not only to measure it, but to use it to steer and shape light.”
While the metasurface produced record-breaking speeds under laboratory observations, exactly how fast it can operate remains uncertain. The researchers note that the switching time and the duration of the laser pulse were extremely close, which indicates that quicker pulses could push the optical surface’s speed even higher.
One of the major potential advances that could come from this new metasurface includes systems that carry information primarily with light, end-to-end. Current communications systems use light to transmit messages, but those messages are converted into electrical signals for processing. By increasing the speed at which light can be manipulated, this would reduce the necessity to convert light signals into electrical ones, removing unnecessary actions in computing.
“This work points to a broader opportunity: using engineered structures to strengthen interactions between light and matter and turn them into tools for control, sensing, and information processing,” Dr. Michaeli said. “This is closely connected to research directions we are now pursuing at Tel Aviv University.”
Despite its promise, the work is still in the fundamental phase. Although not yet ready for practical use, the metasurface offers promise in future ultra-fast computing applications, where it may soon help to cut out the middleman of electronic conversion.
The paper, “Ultrafast, Reconfigurable All-Optical Beam Steering and Spatial Light Modulation,” appeared in Nature Nanotechnology on June 22, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.
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