Nuclear geyser model of the origin of life:Driving force to promote the synthesis of building blocks of life

We propose the nuclear geyser model to elucidate an optimal site to bear the first life.Our model overcomes the difficulties that previously proposed models have encountered.Nuclear geyser is a geyser driven by a natural nuclear reactor,which was likely common in the Hadean Earth,because of a much higher abundance of 235U as nuclear fuel.The nuclear geyser supplies the following：（1）high-density ionizing radiation to promote chemical chain reactions that even tar can be used for intermediate material to restart chemical reactions,（2）a system to maintain the circulation of material and energy,which includes cyclic environmental conditions（warm/cool,dry/wet,etc.）to enable to produce complex organic compounds,（3）a lower temperature than 100℃ as not to break down macromolecular organic compounds,（4）a locally reductive environment depending on rock types exposed along the geyser wall,and（5）a container to confine and accumulate volatile chemicals.These five factors are the necessary conditions that the birth place of life must satisfy.Only the nuclear geyser can meet all five,in contrast to the previously proposed birth sites,such as tidal flat,submarine hydrothermal vent,and outer space.The nuclear reactor and associated geyser,which maintain the circulations of material and energy with its surrounding environment,are regarded as the nuclear geyser system that enables numerous kinds of chemical reactions to synthesize complex organic compounds,and where the most primitive metabolism could be generated.

Unconventional energetics of small vacancy clusters in BCC high-entropy alloy Nb_(0.75)ZrTiV_(0.5)

The stability of small vacancy clusters including divacancy,trivacancy and tetravacancy has been studied in body-centered cubic high-entropy alloy Nb_(0.75)ZrTiV_(0.5) in structures of random solid solution and short-range order by first-principles calculations and molecular dynamics simulations.Different from conventional body-centered cubic metals,the tightly bound configurations have a lower structural stability and are not preferred energetically in the studied high-entropy alloy.Instability of vacancy configurations leads to vacancy-atom exchanges that favor less compact configurations.The formation energy of small vacancy clusters is much smaller than its constituent elements of Nb and V due to the large structural adjustment induced by severe local lattice distortion.The difference in local lattice distortion and elemental arrangement in the vacancy neighborhood leads to significant site-to-site variation in vacancy cluster energy and configuration.The formation energy has a strong correlation with the local energy state of the vacancy configuration and the extent of structural relaxation.Compared to random solid solution,the structure of short-range order has a higher stability for the most compact cluster configurations and tends to have higher vacancy cluster formation energy.According to classical molecular dynamics simulations of cluster diffusion at high temperature,the studied high-entropy alloy has a higher probability of cluster dissociation compared to Nb and V.The unconventional energetics of small vacancy clusters is expected to have a profound impact on their generation,diffusion,dissociation,coalescence,as well as the defect microstructure evolution during irradiation.