Pencil 'Lead' Mightier than Diamonds?

GuardianBob420 writes "Space Daily is reporting that a team of researchers has used a combination of extreme pressure and irradiation to alter the molecular structure of graphite -- resulting in a previously unobserved super-hard form of the stuff. From the article: 'The graphite that resulted from our experiment was so hard that when we released the pressure we saw that it had actually cracked the diamond anvil.'"

Pencil Lead

[Anonymous Coward]

<pendatic>Pencil lead isn't lead or graphite. It's (usually) a mixture of graphite and clay. So pencil lead wouldn't work in this process.</pendatic>

Re:Sure, it may be hard...

[Lost Canadian Abroad]

I beg to differ, the original story pointed to by this slashdot [slashdot.org] artical tells of a couple of fairly (relative) cheap means of mass producing diamonds as well as giving them just about any shape possible, from one of the methods. Thus giving us almost unlimited possibilites for uses in computing and other applications.

Maybe as the technology for growing diamonds becomes more precise and readily available, more usable quanities of this dense graphite material could be produced.

Answers to your questions

[siskbc]

Upon first glance at that story one could point out a handful of blatantly false statements that the 'journalist' had embellished upon the presumed press release. To start with, the caption on the bizzare first image ignored atomic carbon (carbon black), nanotubes and the veritable zoo of non-C60 fullerenes.

Yeah, that aggravated me too. Actually, even chemists consider buckys to be a third allotrope as carbon. As a chemist, I consider it bullshit for the same reason you mention. For what it's worth, Carbon-black is not pure carbon - it's a misture of large polynuclear hydrocarbons. It's graphite-like, but does contain hydrogen.

These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?

I was annoyed by the same - fortunately, my school has a subscription to Science. Graphite, of course, is a planar, sp2 hybridized structure that forms layers of sheets. The sheets are staggered by half a ring, so that half of the carbons are centered over another carbon, and half are centered over the middle of a ring. Under high enough pressure, the carbons that are right over each other form a sigma bond. According to the article, this happens gradually over a range of like 10-20 GPa, with theoretically half the carbons ultimately forming interplane sigma bonds if one considered a two-plane system.

Unfortunately, even the Science article was stingy on the details (as they tend to be).

Re:Absolute Rubbish Reporting

[omega_cubed]

The picture is actually correct, for the C-60. The C-60 bucky ball IS shaped like a soccerball. It doesn't have 60 sides. It has 60 carbon atoms. The soccerball (a truncated icosahedron) has 12 pentagons on it whose vertices accounts for all the vertices of the solid.

W