{"id":184,"date":"2012-08-27T13:04:19","date_gmt":"2012-08-27T13:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/?p=184"},"modified":"2012-08-27T13:08:33","modified_gmt":"2012-08-27T13:08:33","slug":"new-form-of-carbon-observed-stronger-as-dimonds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/?p=184","title":{"rendered":"New form of carbon observed, stronger as diamonds"},"content":{"rendered":"

A team of scientists led by Carnegie\u2019s Lin Wang has observed a new form of very hard carbon clusters, which are unusual in their mix of crystalline and disordered structure. The material is capable of indenting diamond. This finding has potential applications for a range of mechanical, electronic, and electrochemical uses. The work is published in Science<\/em> on August 17.<\/strong> (from carnegiescience.edu)<\/h1>\n
\n
Carbon is the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe and takes on a wide variety of forms\u2014the honeycomb-like graphene, the pencil \u201clead\u201d graphite, diamond, cylindrically structured nanotubes, and hollow spheres called fullerenes.
\nSome forms of carbon are crystalline, meaning that the structure is organized in repeating atomic units. Other forms are amorphous, meaning that the structure lacks the long-range order of crystals. Hybrid products that combine both crystalline and amorphous elements had not previously been observed, although scientists believed they could be created.
\nWang\u2019s team\u2014including Carnegie\u2019s Wenge Yang, Zhenxian Liu, Stanislav Sinogeikin, and Yue Meng\u2014started with a substance called carbon-60 cages, made of highly organized balls of carbon constructed of pentagon and hexagon rings bonded together to form a round, hollow shape. An organic xylene solvent was put into the spaces between the balls and formed a new structure. They then applied pressure to this combination of carbon cages and solvent, to see how it changed under different stresses.
\nAt relatively low pressure, the carbon-60\u2019s cage structure remained. But as the pressure increased, the cage structures started to collapse into more amorphous carbon clusters. However, the amorphous clusters still occupy their original sites, forming a lattice structure.
\nThe team discovered that there is a narrow window of pressure, about 320,000 times the normal atmosphere, under which this new structured carbon is created and does not bounce back to the cage structure when pressure is removed. This is crucial for finding practical applications for the new material going forward.
\nThis material was capable of indenting the diamond anvil used in creating the high-pressure conditions. This means that the material is superhard.
\nIf the solvent used to prepare the new form of carbon is removed by heat treatment, the material loses its lattice periodicity, indicating that the solvent is crucial for maintaining the chemical transition that underlies the new structure. Because there are many similar solvents, it is theoretically possible that an array of similar, but slightly different, carbon lattices could be created using this pressure method.
\n\u201cWe created a new type of carbon material, one that is comparable to diamond in its inability to be compressed,\u201d Wang said. \u201cOnce created under extreme pressures, this material can exist at normal conditions, meaning it could be used for a wide array of practical applications.\u201d
\nWang\u2019s other co-authors on the paper were Bingbing Liu of Jilin University, Hui Li and Xiao Cheng Zeng of the University of Nebraska, Yang Ding of the Argonne National Laboratory, and Wendy Mao of Stanford University.<\/strong>
\n__________________
\nThis research was supported by EFree, funded by Basic Energy Sciences, Department of Energy (DOE-BES). HPCAT, APS is supported by the Carnegie Institution for Science; the Carnegie DOE Alliance Center (DCAC); the University of Nevada at Las Vegas; and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory through funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy (DOE-NNSA). U2A is supported by the National Science Foundation (COMPRES), DOE-NNSA, and DOE-BES.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of scientists led by Carnegie\u2019s Lin Wang has observed a new form of very hard carbon clusters, which are unusual in their mix of crystalline and disordered structure. The material is capable of indenting diamond. This finding has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nkisiland.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}