Chinese scientists have created a ‘super diamond’ 40% harder and far more durable than natural ones.
Experts say the creation could lead to breakthroughs across several key industries that rely on diamonds, including polishing and cutting tools.
Until now, the hardest diamonds have been found in asteroid and meteoroid impact craters – meaning they are rare and often very small.
Most natural and synthetic diamonds have a cubic structure, but ultra-hard diamonds such as those found in craters – known as lonsdaleite – have a hexagonal structure.
Lonsdaleite was first discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona in 1967.
While applications of such hexagonal diamonds (HDs) have been largely underexplored due to the small size and low purity of samples obtained, a group of researchers has made a ‘well-crystallised, nearly pure HD’ by heating highly compressed graphite.
The researchers, led by Liu Bingbing and Yao Mingguang from China’s Jilin University, say the diamond’s excellent thermal stability and ultra-high hardness mean it could have ‘great potential for industrial applications’.
The ‘super diamond’ structure exhibits high thermal stability ‘up to 1,100°C and a very high hardness of 155 Giga Pascals (GPa)’, according to the research, published in the Nature Materials journal.
In comparison, natural diamonds have a hardness of around 100 GPa and a thermal stability up to around 700°C
Despite the diamond’s rare qualities, it would be no more expensive than natural ones sold at jewelry stores, Professor Oliver Williams, Chair
Condensed Matter and Photonics Group at Cardiff University, says.
‘A synthetic diamond could be as low as $300 from China.
‘It’s very cheap. For industrial application, they are going to have to be a lot cheaper than natural diamonds.
‘If you make a 40% harder one, there has to be a premium, but I can’t imagine that it’ll be much higher.
Ben Green, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, also told Metro that the ‘super diamond’ would not be used at scale if it were costly.
‘There are significant challenges to overcome before this material can be used at scale, but if a method could be found to [for example] produce bulk quantities or coat other materials in it, then depending on price it might find industrial use.
‘The most obvious application is cutting (possibly including other diamonds!).’
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