AN ACCIDENTAL explosion in a German physics lab has led to the identification
of a superpowerful explosive. The substance—an exotic form of
silicon—releases seven times as much energy as TNT, and explodes a million
times faster.
“This might be the strongest explosive ever discovered,” says Dmitri Kovalev,
the physicist who runs the laboratory at the Technical University of Munich in
Garching.
Kovalev and his team were studying the optical properties of porous silicon,
a sponge-like material. The group had cooled the silicon in a vacuum to the
temperature of liquid nitrogen, when suddenly a leak in their equipment…
