Creating nanostars with buckyballs

•Discovery of excimer-like high-energy molecules in highly compressed materials.•Most of elements in the periodic table are subject to formation of the molecules.•Highly portable devices for production and widespread usage of “stellar” materials.•Ultra-high efficiency generation of semi-coherent X-rays suitable for X-ray lasers.•Tunable X-ray wavelength by changing the target elements and impact energy.

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.