At about 170,000 atmospheres of pressure, scientists managed to use super-hard graphite to crack a diamond in 2003, however the precise reason remained something of a mystery. Is it possible that a material has been discovered that it is stronger than diamonds – the hardest substance known to man?

At about 170,000 atmospheres of pressure, scientists managed to use super-hard graphite to crack a diamond in 2003, however the precise reason remained something of a mystery. Now maybe it’s not.

Hui-Tian Wang at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, and colleagues have shown that the compressed material could be at least partly made of bct-carbon, which is built up from rings of four carbon atoms.

Bct-carbon has attributes of both diamond, which has a cubic structure, and graphite, composed of loosely linked sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice. In bct-carbon, layers of carbon rings are linked by strong vertical bonds.

The new technique is also believed to require far less heating than other super-hard materials, which would be a benefit to anyone in the near future who requires large amounts of the material.

Credit is given to AWDC by DiamondTopics.com News