A single diamond so small that it is made of only about 3,000 carbon atoms still takes a team of scientists nearly a hundred laser shots to create just a pinch of material. But that tiny pinch is a breakthrough. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Rostock in Germany have figured out how to use powerful lasers to turn ordinary plastic into ultra-small, high-purity nanodiamonds — and they can do it far more cleanly and precisely than ever before.
Nanodiamonds are diamond particles just a few millionths of a millimeter across. They are extremely hard, stable and heat-resistant, which makes them useful in medicine, new materials, catalysts and energy technology. Until now, making them meant messy, imprecise methods like explosions, which leave a wide mix of sizes and impurities. The laser method, by contrast, produces diamonds of nearly identical size with spectacular purity.
The idea actually began as a question about faraway planets. The team fired high-power lasers at thin sheets of plastic, heating and squeezing the material millions of times harder than Earth's atmosphere to mimic the crushing conditions inside planets like Neptune and Uranus, where carbon can transform into diamond. The surprise, says Dominik Kraus, founding director of the new HEDI institute at HZDR and a professor at Rostock, was not that diamonds formed — they expected that — but how incredibly fast it happened. That speed immediately sparked the idea of a real technological use.
The experiments ran at the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) laser facility south of Prague, one of the most powerful in the world. Three times a minute, the high-power laser fires pulses at a plastic film a hundredth the width of a human hair, blasting off nanodiamonds like tiny projectiles. Each shot flings roughly 10 trillion diamonds into a waiting collector — so many it sounds like a fortune, yet so light that a hundred shots yield only a few hundred micrograms, barely a few grains of sand.
Catching them is a delicate art. "When the compression wave reaches the end of the sample it abruptly enters a vacuum, accelerating the nanodiamonds to speeds of more than 10 kilometers per second — comparable to a meteorite impact," Kraus explains. To keep them from smashing to dust, the team collects them in a soft, water-soluble ionic gel. After purifying the haul, lead author Ben Heuser finally saw them clearly with the ELMI-MV electron microscope at Rostock. "That was a special moment we had been working toward for years," he says. "With this instrument, we can even resolve individual atoms."
Because laser technology itself is advancing fast thanks to fusion research, this production method is likely to become truly scalable. The researchers now aim to boost their output into the milligram range, matching what conventional factories make — opening the door to cleaner, sustainable nanodiamond manufacturing.