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New Ultrahard Diamond Glass Synthesized
Carnegie's Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang were part of an international research team that synthesized a new ultrahard form of carbon glass with a wealth of potential practical applications for devices and electronics. It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials. Their findings are published in Nature.
[...] Because of its extremely high melting point, it's impossible to use diamond as the starting point to synthesize diamond-like glass. However, the research team, led by Jilin University's Bingbing Liu and Mingguang Yao—a former Carnegie visiting scholar—made their breakthrough by using a form of carbon composed of 60 molecules arranged to form a hollow ball. Informally called a buckyball, this Nobel Prize-winning material was heated just enough to collapse its soccer-ball-like structure to induce disorder before turning the carbon to crystalline diamond under pressure.
The team used a large-volume multi-anvil press to synthesize the diamond-like glass. The glass is sufficient large for characterization. Its properties were confirmed using a variety of advanced, high-resolution techniques for probing atomic structure.
Journal Reference:
Yuchen Shang, Zhaodong Liu, Jiajun Dong, et al. Ultrahard bulk amorphous carbon from collapsed fullerene, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03882-9)
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @02:04AM (4 children)
So I suppose we'll be leaving for practicable purposes, non-biodegradable and indestructible screens in landfills or littered that will last until the sun explodes. At least until we get hologram projection and neurolink up and running..
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Saturday November 27 2021, @02:12AM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @03:44AM
Bunch of pearl clutching econuts. I bet they'd complain about heavy metal poisoning on the beach at Keela-Wee.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:15PM (1 child)
Yeah about that...
First of all there's Glass as in transparent optical solid that makes lenses and windows.
Then there's Glass as in material science glass that has no discernable crystalline structure (which is probs why it makes such good optical components) and generally as you'd expect from non-homogenous non-crystalline structure its viscosity vs temp has no knees like you see in solder where it goes from solid to liq instantly. So you can heat glass and its mushy.
This stuff is C60 smashed into a glassy solid in the solid state physics sense, not a house glass transparent window made of C60, as I understand it.
Occasionally, because C60 was new when I was a kid, I keep up on its chemistry, and sadly its quite unstable when exposed to light especially in water. So sunlight and rain will destroy C60 quite fast. Because it forms naturally in candle flames and stuff, you can guess that C60 is unstable in the environment because all the worlds carbon is NOT C60.
Anyway I'd guess that smashing the crap out of C60, given that C60 isn't very stable to begin with, would imply glassy flattened C60 would NOT be some kind of "gorilla glass" cell phone screen replacement, I would NOT expect it to be durable.
But no it is not likely to be a "glass window" in your house or phone or in halogen lightbulbs or whatevs.
The chemistry and biochemistry of C60 are interesting. I would have thought the kidneys would pee it out but its apparently too big, so your liver flushes it out in bile after a couple days. Also pure C60 seems neutral to positive for healthy but its inevitable decay products are extremely toxic. Kind of like Uranium, which in pure form is pretty boring and very slow decaying but the inevitable decay products will give you cancer so in the end you'd want to avoid eating it. As you'd probably want to avoid eating C60.
Also WRT thermal conductivity, its the highest GLASS thermal conductivity out there, but its ten times worse than aluminum metal. Of course as a glass it presumably doesn't conduct electricity as well as aluminum. Anyway its a shitty thermal conductor, almost exactly as bad as stainless steel (yeah I looked it up, yeah it depends on exact type of stainless steel and chromium content, but whatever its right about the same to one sig fig) Its high thermal conductivity for a GLASS but not high compared to metals or other substances.
Note that might make it useful for laser focusing lenses or heat sink insulators. Its about 20 times more heat conductive than mica and I mica insulated many power transistors in my day. Then again a VERY thin layer of mica is electrically insulative enough AND mechanically strong enough AND cheap and easy enough to make, and I donno about this stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28 2021, @01:22AM
> you can guess that C60 is unstable in the environment because all the worlds carbon is NOT C60.
No it's diamonds AMIRITE. What a pile of waffle.