Experimental Investigation of Diamond Precipitation inside Giant Planets

The effects of hydrocarbon reactions and diamond precipitation on the internal structure and evolution of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus have been discussed for more than three decades. Inside these celestial bodies, gravity compresses mixtures of light elements to densities of several grams per cubic centimeter while the temperature reaches thousands of kelvins resulting in thermal energies on the order of chemical bond energies and above. Under these conditions, simple hydrocarbons like methane, which are highly abundant in the atmospheres, are believed to undergo structural transitions that release hydrogen from deeper layers and may lead to compact stratified cores. Indeed, the isentropes of Uranus and Neptune intersect a temperature-pressure regime where first polymerization occurs, whereas in deeper layers, a phase separation into diamond and hydrogen may be possible. Here we show experimental evidence for this phase separation process obtained by in situ X-ray diffraction from polystyrene (C8H8)n samples dynamically compressed to conditions around 150 GPa and 5000 K, which resembles the environment ~10,000 km below the surfaces of Neptune and Uranus [1]. Our findings demonstrate the necessity of high pressures for initiating carbon-hydrogen demixing and imply that diamond precipitation may require ~10x higher pressures than previously suggested by static compression experiments. In addition to their relevance for planetary modelling, by showing the formation of nanodiamonds from laser-irradiated plastic, our results identify a possible method to produce diamond nanoparticles for material science and industrial applications.