Dilithium

:This article is about a fictitious substance. There is also a rock formation in Owens River Gorge in California called The Dilithium Crystal.

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Dilithium is a fictional crystalline mineral in the universe of Star Trek. A beam of matter and antimatter colliding in dilithium generates a plasma that is used to power the warp drives that allow starships to travel faster than light. This function of dilithium was officially established with the ' series; in earlier works its properties were not clearly defined.

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In the original series, dilithium crystals occurred only naturally, making the search for them a major plot element for a number of stories. In ', Spock discovered a method of recrystallizing dilithium that allowed the crew to regenerate the crystals on board their captured Klingon Bird-of-prey. This involved using 20th century fission reactors to collect high-energy photons which would cause the crystals to regenerate.

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To avoid plots based on searches for dilithium crystals, the back-story of The Next Generation has dilithium synthesized artificially. These crystals can also be recrystallized using technology that had been developed during the time between the ' movies and the events of The Next Generation.

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It has been established that a large amount of dilithium can cause a planet to become geologically unstable, leading to a number of planets that had broken apart. The crew of the Enterprise-D found a method of eliminating the dilithium from such planets in order to save them.

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Neither dilithium, trilithium nor paralithium exist in the real world, but are suggestive of an as yet undiscovered form of lithium.

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In the computer game nethack, dilithium crystals are the most valuable gemstone you can find. They are white, and have the same hardness as worthless glass.

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