New Substance Is Harder Than Diamond,

Until recently, diamond was the hardest known naturally occurring material. But a new physical process applied to carbon has uncovered a substance that a group of scientists say is even harder.

Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a technique for creating a substance they are calling Q-carbon, which represents a third phase, or distinct form, of carbon alongside graphite and diamond.

more…

>>>Until recently, diamond was the hardest known naturally occurring material.

>>>Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a technique for creating a substance … they say is even harder.

So diamond is still the hardest known naturally occurring substance. So nothing’s changed. There are several other artificial compounds already known to be harder than diamond. Also, diamond has two different hardnesses: one on the <111> axis (the hardest), and one on an axis perpendicular to that.

btm said:

>>>Until recently, diamond was the hardest known naturally occurring material.

>>>Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a technique for creating a substance … they say is even harder.

So diamond is still the hardest known naturally occurring substance. So nothing’s changed. There are several other artificial compounds already known to be harder than diamond. Also, diamond has two different hardnesses: one on the <111> axis (the hardest), and one on an axis perpendicular to that.

what btm said

It’s still a pretty good miracle, by anyone’s standards.

The Rev Dodgson said:

It’s still a pretty good miracle, by anyone’s standards.

mine too. ;)

CrazyNeutrino said:

New Substance Is Harder Than Diamond,

Until recently, diamond was the hardest known naturally occurring material. But a new physical process applied to carbon has uncovered a substance that a group of scientists say is even harder.

Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a technique for creating a substance they are calling Q-carbon, which represents a third phase, or distinct form, of carbon alongside graphite and diamond.

more…

I’m sure there’s an already-known phase of carbon that’s harder than diamond.The name will come back to be in a while.

> one that has been drawing interest in Silicon Valley known as chemical vapor deposition.

That was on TV, hand-made diamonds using chemical vapour deposition, on the same TV show that hand-made a nitrogen laser out of air.

The technical article is free:
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/118/21/10.1063/1.4936595
“Q-carbon” is described only as “amorphous amorphous carbon with some sp3 content”. Yes they did say “amorphous” twice. The paper is not well written as it is practically impossible to distinguish by the grammar between before-heating and after-heating states. eg. “nanosecond laser melting of amorphous carbon films with sp3 fraction 20%–50%” suggests that this state exists before heating rather than after. Given that the before state is amorphous diamond-like-carbon that is a distinct possibility. The carbon is analysed by all these techniques after heating but not before, so it’s not possible to determine if the heating had any effect at all.

So my response is, this may be an exceedingly important paper, but the English is so badly written that it’s impossible to tell.