Carbon and nitrogen-based substance nearly as hard as diamond.

An elusive material that scientists have wanted to create for decades has finally been synthesized under tremendous heat and pressure. Its hardness is almost the same as diamond. It can be used as cutting tools, sensors, and even explosives.

In 1989, researchers theorized that materials made from carbon and nitrogen would be less compressible and more resistant to shear than the hardest known material, diamond. However, efforts to achieve this have failed.

now, dominique raniel He and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh in the UK created a small sample of the material, a type of carbon nitride. They achieved this by compressing carbon and nitrogen between the points of the diamond at a pressure 700,000 times that of atmospheric pressure and heating it to 3000°C with a laser.

Diamond has a hardness of approximately 90 gigapascals, and the second hardest material known to date, cubic boron nitride, has a hardness of 50 to 55 GPa. Ranier said the new material scores between 78 and 86 GPa, depending on which of the three crystal structures it forms.

Quote from Works from 1989 The idea that the hardness of this substance exceeds that of diamond has now been overturned, and it is now believed that no substance exceeds it.

“There is a huge gap between diamonds and diamonds.” [previous] Second best. So we’re starting to bridge that gap and close it,” Lanier says. He said the new material is called carbon nitride, even though there are existing materials made from these two very different elements, adding that the more chemically accurate name is “a bit of an overstatement.” The researchers said they welcome proposals.

The samples are only 5 micrometers wide and 3 micrometers deep, which could make large-scale production difficult. Compressing the sample using larger diamonds could theoretically create larger pieces of material, but more intense compression would be required to form them.

This would make carbon nitride much more expensive to purchase than diamond. But Lanier said the material has advantages over diamond, such as generating electrical signals under pressure, which could be useful in sensors. Its high energy density also has the potential to make it a powerful explosive that is less toxic to the environment than current alternatives, Lanier said.