A Thin Film Takes the Hit express
A film as thin as a spider's web, made of five metals, took the hit from a laser. Inside, the pressure soared to 55 gigapascals — imagine a hundred elephants balanced on your thumbnail. The alloy withstood it, compressing for a fraction of a nanosecond without breaking.
The scientists tracked this with an X-ray flash lasting seven femtoseconds. For comparison, in one femtosecond, light travels a distance a hundred times thinner than a human hair. The flash managed to 'photograph' how the atoms in the alloy compressed by five percent.
Such experiments help predict how a material will behave under impact or explosion. An alloy of five metals that doesn't shatter under monstrous pressure could find use in shielding spacecraft or in reactors.
A pressure of 55 gigapascals is comparable to that at the center of the Earth, at a depth of about 1500 kilometers.
In Andy Weir's novel 'The Martian,' a thin alloy film shields a Martian base from micrometeorite impacts.