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takyon writes:

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)

Original Submission