Buckybombs: nanoscale explosions, releasing 3000K in 50 picosecs: what applications?

New journal article on exploding fullerenes:
Nanoscale explosives represent a special group because of high density of energetic covalent bonds. The reactive molecular dynamics study of nitro-fullerene decomposition reported here provides, for the first time, a detailed chemical mechanism of explosion of a nanoscale carbon material. Upon initial heating, C60(NO2)12 disintegrates, increasing temperature and pressure by thousands of Kelvins and bars within tens of picoseconds.
The authors cite solar cells, anti-cancer therapy, industrial, and military applications. What might those be, besides assassin’s tool? (The citation titles give no clue otherwise.)

Also, any other comments on the science would be welcome. The concept of energetics of molecular membranes never occurred to me before.

Small point on publishing: Notice the grabby artistic illustration showing Explosions in Inner Space!. I used to commission those in laymen’s articles I handled, but never saw within an article in a scientific journal under these circumstances. Has anyone ever seen that? Unless that was wraparound art of the journal–but that can’t be, it’s prepress–and that would be stealing. So some grant or university salary paid for that…

Sorry, here’s the article cite.

Well, arXiv.org is not actually a scientific journal, and if the article actually makes it into a journal, that picture will very likely no longer be there. It is basically a minor variant of the molecular diagrams in the body of the article, set against an explodey looking background that is probably clip art, so I doubt whether making it took more than a few extra minutes of any scientist’s time. They are allowed some fun.

The article actually says this:

The applications for solar cells and anti-cancer therapy are only for ordinary nanoscale carbon (by which you can be sure they mean this year’s poster-boy Graphene) rather than their Bucky-Bombs.

They seem proud of the reaction time for their little explosions, but not being a chemist I have no idea what the relative time scales are compared to other explosives. Note that all they have done is simulate up to 8 molecules exploding in a simulated box. So questions about spontaneous decomposition, and all the other mundane aspects of explosives are probably not usefully addressed yet. Perhaps when competing armies of grey ooze fight it out they will lob bucky-bombs at one another.

Makes me think of dry ice blasting, in which dry ice pellets are blasted at a surface to clean it. The thermal stresses of the sublimating dry ice crack away surface contaminants without adding any chemical residue.

I wonder if bucky bombs could do something similar, but with thermal stresses going in the opposite direction: intense heating of the outermost paper-thin layer of contaminant/substrate causes it to crack away, leaving fresh, clean substrate underneath. Maybe not so much, since there would indeed be chemical reactions involved.

That’s all that came out of my tiny brainstorm.