Creating nanostars with buckyballs

We report creating superradiant quantum nanoplasmas (nanostars) by impacting buckyballs at hypervelocities (v>100 km/s) in an innovative tabletop apparatus. The nanostars are estimated to have ～10 TPa transient pressures and convert ～35% of impact energy into soft-X-ray energy. The ultrahigh-efficiency conversion is proposed to result from Dicke Superradiance of Metastable Innershell Molecular State, originally discovered by the author and his colleagues in 1994. The usage of buckyballs and successful orders-of-magnitude scaling down of the apparatus size and complexity establish an innovative tabletop method for generating, studying, and utilizing matter in planetary or stellar interiors and open doors to numerous unprecedented applications.