Diamond, renowned as the toughest substance known to humanity, may soon face competition.
Researchers have discovered a pathway to synthesizing an even harder “super-diamond” from an ultra-strong material that only exists outside Earth’s solar system, Knewz.com has learned.
“Diamond is the strongest material known,” the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California said in a statement on Monday, March 18. “However, another form of carbon has been predicted to be even tougher than diamond. The challenge is how to create it on Earth.”
The potential new super-strong material is called “BC8,” a body-centered cubic crystal made up of eight carbon atoms.
“The BC8 phase of carbon at ambient conditions would be a new super-hard material that would likely be tougher than diamond,” Ivan Oleynik, a physics professor at the University of South Florida and senior author of a paper on the findings, published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, said.
While it resembles diamond, BC8 is projected to be even tougher, boasting a 30% greater resistance to compression.
Diamond owes its hardness to its latticed molecular structure. Each carbon atom is bonded to four neighboring carbon atoms, forming a “tetrahedral” shape. Perfectly-aligned electrons are shared between neighboring atoms, creating strong covalent bonds, and this results in a highly stable and rigid structure.
“The BC8 structure maintains this perfect tetrahedral nearest-neighbor shape, but without the cleavage planes found in the diamond structure,” LLNL scientist and study co-author Jon Eggert said, echoing Oleynik’s stance that “the BC8 phase of carbon at ambient conditions would likely be much tougher than diamond.”
Theoretical predictions place BC8 as the most stable carbon phase under pressures exceeding 10 million atmospheres, according to the new study. However, no one has been able to create the material on Earth.
“Despite numerous efforts to synthesize this elusive carbon crystalline phase, including previous National Ignition Facility (NIF) campaigns, it has yet to be observed,” LLNL scientist Marius Millot, who also was involved in the research, said.
BC8 is thought to exist outside Earth’s solar system, where scientists theorize it could form under the extreme pressures deep within carbon-rich exoplanets.
“Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the properties of the BC8 carbon phase becomes critical for the development of accurate interior models of these exoplanets,” Oleynik said.
Using Frontier, the fastest exascale supercomputer in the world, the team simulated how BC8 might form under extreme conditions. These simulations revealed insights into why BC8 has been so difficult to produce in the lab and illuminated potential avenues for overcoming these challenges.
“Through quantum-accurate multimillion atom molecular dynamics simulations, we have uncovered the extreme metastability of diamond at very high pressures, significantly exceeding its range of thermodynamic stability,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The findings present viable compression pathways to access the restricted domain where BC8 synthesis becomes achievable.
“By efficiently implementing this potential on GPU-based (graphics processing unit) Frontier, we can now accurately simulate the time evolution of billions of carbon atoms under extreme conditions at experimental time and length scales,” Oleynik said. “We predicted that the post-diamond BC8 phase would be experimentally accessible only within a narrow high-pressure, high-temperature region of the carbon phase diagram.”
The researchers hope to grow a small amount of the “super-diamond” in their lab by synthesizing the carbon phase and recovering a BC8 crystal back to ambient conditions.
The post Creating a ‘Super-Diamond’: Scientists Find Way to Simulate Synthesis of Material From Beyond Solar System appeared first on Knewz.
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Author: Marissa Papanek
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