New Material Harder Than Diamond

h4x0r-3l337 writes "Diamond is no longer the hardest substance known to man. Scientists have created a new material, called "aggregated diamond nanorods" by compressing carbon-60 under high heat. From the article: 'The hardness of a material is measured by its isothermal bulk modulus. Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond.'"

Does that mean..

[postgrep]

Diamonds will come down in price? If we could make a drill out of this new material, doesn't that mean we would have a surplus of diamond to use? And who gets the dub the name for this material?

Possible uses?

[allanj]

OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest, and that this does not open up whole new frontiers of exciting materials - or am I completely wrong here? Is there some magical "limit" that was exceeded by this? If there *IS* a magical limit somewhere, what is it?

Re:Possible uses?

[bmo]

"OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest"

Uhm, don't underestimate the profit-increasing abilities of new materials.

Borazon, for example, is a synthetic material that is used in abrasives and cutting tools. The value isn't in the material itself, but in what one can do with it.

If it's about as expensive as synthetic diamond (an oxymoron - synthetic diamond is just as real as "real" diamonds) or borazon, expect this to wind up in concrete saws, grinding wheels, end mills, drills (masonry, metal, oil industry) and a whole zoo of tools.

It's not a "modest improvement". It's a technological leap comparable to synthesizing diamonds and superabrasives, which revolutionized a lot of industries.

--
BMO

What is it about carbon?

[mcrbids]

We're (laregly) made of carbon. Diamonds, the (formerly) hardest substance known to exist, is made of carbon. This new material is also made of carbon.

Carbon is also the basis for buckyballs, nanotubes, and recently, nanofabric.

What is it about carbon that's so special? Can these things be done with other elements, like nitrogen? Is it just because we have an oil (carbon) based economy, or what?

Seems like all the interesting stuff in materials physics in early 2000's is ALL CARBON!

Re:Possible uses?

[jericho4.0]

Maybe it's not a given that it would be good at the common industrial uses of diamonds. As it's formed from evenly sized tubes of carbon atoms, it might not Carry a strong, sharp edge, and that it might have a grain. I imagine the structure is pretty squished though, just like diamond, only with fewer flaws.

In some googling on this, I've become confused. "ultrahard fullerene" [google.ca] is C-60 buckyballs compressed at high temperature also. I see many different values quoted for UHF hardness and diamond. This Russian paper [aip.org] gives a value of 1 TPa in 1988!

Trivia

[Palal]

Artificial diamonds were first developed in Kiev, Ukraine at the University for Superhard Materials. Later, there were plans to make them into armor (armored cars, armored vests, etc.).

Re:What is it about carbon?

[MAdMaxOr]

From Wikipedia: "[Carbon] also has the interesting chemical property of being able to bond with itself and a wide variety of other elements, forming nearly 10 million known compounds."

Not only is it able to chain, and thereby make organic compounds, DNA, nanofiber, but the bonds it forms can be very weak or strong. So yeah, carbon has unique chemical properties, its cheap, and (too) widely available.

As a side question, who thinks that as all of the advanced carbon materials become readily available over the next 50 years, and demand increases, that we may have found our solution to global warming? We'll scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to build our carbon products!

Re:Bucky balls...

[0xCAFE]

Apparently... http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/physics.htm #properties [att.net]
But only in certain cases. Also, bucky balls are toxic. While their individual atomic structure is superhard, they don't adhere to each other well, making them more like graphite than diamond.

Re:Why are you giving us the modulus?

[hopethisnickisnottak]

Hmm ...
The Brinnel hardness test scale has Diamond listed on it. You can test this new substance by using it as an indentor on Diamond, then work backwards from there to arrive at a hardness number for this substance.

Re:Space Lift?

[polysylabic psudonym]

Nope, no good for ringworld either, you need things strong in compression and tension for that.

Hard is good for scratching, cutting, abrading, resisting scratching, resisting cutting.

It's no good for avoiding chipping breaking or crushing - although I suspect there is a correlation between compression strength and hardness.

What I'm hoping for is a material such as this with excellent hardness, but also good optical properties and easy manufacture into large pieces of arbitrary shape. That would be good for lenses for telescopes, mirrors (telescopes again), spectacles (glasses), car windscreens, spacecraft windows... Imagine it - glasses that never scratch!

How did they measure the hardness?

[mr fog]

Reading TFA, they apparently used a Diamond Anvil Cell [wikipedia.org] to measure the hardness. This apprently consists of "two opposing cone-shaped diamonds squeezed together by a lever arm" (wikipedia).

So my question is: If this stuff is harder than diamonds, surely the "opposing cone-shaped diamonds" would deform before the sample being measured?

Re:hmmm

[Vo0k]

Wow, that's almost half a mile of mercury!

Re:General Products?

[R2.0]

I believe GP hulls are monomolecular, and the only thing that bothers them is a buttload of antimatter. Can't remember the story reference, though.

Re:Diamonds =/= Diamonds?

[darkonc]

Quite possibly not. 'hard' means that it is resistant to pressure. The space elevator needs to be resistant to tension and torque. If this stuff is brittle (very likely), it could be useless for that application.

Reference for the uninitiated

[p3d0]

I had to look this up... General Products [slashdot.org].

Re:To all the posters making jokes about thier wiv

[Dread_ed]

Speaking of other kinds of women, I read a statistic in the paper yesterday that said that there are more than 20,000 battered women in my city alone.

And to think, all this time I have been eating them plain.

Re:Diamonds =/= Diamonds?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are assuming that the space elevator only requires a high tensile strength cable to work. What about the high strength anchoring mechanisms needed on each side of the cable as well as many other parts that will require materials with extreme hardness.

Re:hmmm

[Rei]

This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that such a material could be made - there are a lot of new potential materials out there, so don't expect this record to stand forever. For example, pressure-induced interlinking of carbon nanotubes [aps.org] could potentially best it. There's no reason to think that C60 is going to be the best source material to interlink.

Re:General Products?

[khallow]

Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] to the rescue. The story is called "Flatlander" by Larry Niven.

Re:General Products?

[admiralh]

That, and tides.

See "Neutron Star".

Hard is not Tough

[magarity]

This new material is harder than diamonds but there's nothing to indicate its toughness. Which is important. Diamonds are easy to chip on something tougher because they aren't themselves very tough; they're just hard. To illustrade: Imagine a picture window and a bar of iron. Throw the bar of iron at the window. The window breaks because it is not as tough as the iron bar. But take a peice of the resulting broken glass and you can scrape the iron bar because the glass is harder than the iron.
 
This is why a jewelry salesperson will panic if you try to scrape a diamond ring on the display glass; it's not the glass they're worried about. The diamond can break doing that if you hit someone else's prior scrape because the glass is tougher than the diamond.