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There is a reason we use diamonds as a benchmark for hardness. Sparkling gemstones have the highest confirmed Vickers hardness (VH) of all natural materials at around 70 gigapascals (GPa) and they are even named after the Greek word meaning ‘invincible’.
Well, we’re afraid that’s not enough anymore. Chinese scientists have created a new form of carbon called AM-III, and it is the hardest and strongest amorphous material known to date. With a VH of 113 GPa, it’s literally harder than diamond – and about as strong.
“The materials exhibit exceptional mechanical properties – comparable to crystalline diamond, and the hardness and strength of AM-III outperform any known amorphous material,” the researchers explained in their study, published last week in the journal National Science Review.
“The emergence of this type of ultra-hard, ultra-resistant semiconductors [amorphous] carbon material offers excellent candidates [for] most demanding practical applications.
Diamond owes much of its extraordinary strength and durability to its extremely regular structure – it consists only of single carbon atoms arranged in a tetrahedral structure. So you might expect the new, even stronger material to have a similar structure – but you’d be completely wrong.
The team discovered AM-III by crushing buckyballs (a cage of 60 connected carbon atoms arranged much like a soccer ball) until they collapsed, resulting in the creation of a amorphous hardware – this is what AM means in AM-III. This indeed makes it very different from diamond – in fact, it looks more like glass.
You may have heard the myth that glass is actually a liquid. It isn’t, but it’s not exactly a solid either: it’s another one of those particular amorphous solids. What this means, for glass and for AM-III, is that the molecular structure has no long-term order – the molecules are not as disorganized as the chaos you will see in a liquid, but they are not as regular either. and ordered as you find it in a solid. This means that you end up with a material that is solid in every sense of the word, but whose molecules can still move over time – although that is really, really, really long duration.
One of the many suggested applications for AM-III uses this glass-like quality quite directly: it has been suggested that the new material could be used to make bulletproof windows 20 to 100 times stronger than current technology. .
The amorphous quality of AM-III gives it many other properties, making it widely applicable in high-tech industries, according to the researchers. For example, AM-III is also a very good semiconductor. This means the new material may be used for “new photoelectric applications,” the researchers say – think solar power or space-age weapons.
While mass production of the new material is likely to take some time – and probably won’t be cheap – the wide variety of applications makes this new yellow tinted glass something we could see a lot in the future. .
“AM-III is indeed a new AM carbon material never detected and reported before,” the document explains. “The short-range order, distinct microstructure and composition provide a unique combination of semiconductors and superior mechanical properties. […] and calls for further experimental and theoretical exploration of allotropes of AM carbon.
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