All articles tagged with #multicomponent alloy
A grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay contains a microscopic glass bead called hiroshimaite that traps a previously unrecorded multicomponent alloy—an almost uniform mix of iron, chromium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, and aluminum—frozen in an ordered structure by the blast’s rapid cooling, a nonequilibrium phase formed in the atomic fireball.
A Science Advances study reports the discovery of a previously unknown, silicon-rich multicomponent alloy formed inside microscopic grains called ‘hiroshimaites’ created by the Hiroshima atomic blast. The highly ordered tiny crystal demonstrates that extreme, rapid quenching from nuclear detonations can forge new crystalline materials, potentially encoding diagnostic information about the device, environment, and detonation conditions, with implications for nuclear forensics and materials science.