The researchers, led by Liu Bingbing and Yao Mingguang from China’s Jilin University, say the diamond’s excellent thermal stability and ultra-high hardness mean it could have ‘great potential for industrial applications’.
Most natural and synthetic diamonds have a cubic structure, but ultra-hard diamonds such as those found in craters – known as lonsdaleite – have a hexagonal structure.
The ‘super diamond’ structure exhibits high thermal stability ‘up to 1,100°C and a very high hardness of 155 Giga Pascals (GPa)’, according to the research, published in the Nature Materials journal.
While applications of such hexagonal diamonds (HDs) have been largely underexplored due to the small size and low purity of samples obtained, a group of researchers has made a ‘well-crystallised, nearly pure HD’ by heating highly compressed graphite.
Ben Green, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, also told Metro that the ‘super diamond’ would not be used at scale if it were costly.
