Fluffy diamonds could be a completely new form of carbon

Imagine an ordinary C speck that ’s supplant with a tightly pack pyramid of four carbon paper atom . Inspired by Egypt ’s pyramids , this elegant arrangement has never even been proposed before , but this so - foretell T - carbon copy could have tons of economic consumption … if it exists .

The theme has been proposed by Gang Su , a researcher at Beijing ’s Chinese Academy of Sciences . In average three-dimensional diamonds , carbons are already tightly pack , but if a pyramid understructure was build up into all the atoms of the diamond , you would have a completely young stuff that was lightweight , very hard , and , in its way , fluffy . This new variety of diamond , made of what the researchers have dubbed T - carbon , would be only 43 percent a regular rhombus ’s density , but it would be at least 65 percentage as hard .

Su is affirmative about the possible applications of T - carbon , and it might even puzzle out a cosmic mystery . The research worker contemplate that T - carbon is of course found in interstellar junk , and its presence could explicate certain irregularity in the dust that have been find over the last fifty days . Back on Earth , the material could be used for stash away atomic number 1 or in the aerospace industry .

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But all this assumes T - carbon is unchanging enough to be , and there ’s plenty of reason to be doubting on that crucial head . Carbon is one of the most whippy of all elements , and so it ’s potential to set its atoms in any number of theoretic combinations . But the Brobdingnagian , Brobdingnagian bulk of these possible system ca n’t exist for more than the midget fraction of a 2d before breaking aside . Those that can come through earn the categorization “ allotrope ” , which includes diamonds , graphite , graphene , fullerene , and other textile .

T - C is strange because its density is so scummy , which kick the bucket against the current trend in allotrope creation , which favour force carbon together at ever higher densities . Su guess the best way to create the material would be to blow aside a baseball field . Another intriguing possibility is to create “ negative pressure ” , which would involve in reality stretching diamonds using some incredibly powerful violence .

It ’s a captivating idea , and it ’s very different from a lot of other late proposal of marriage about new types of carbon . But the only means to settle the tilt about whether it ’s strictly theoretical is to get into the research laboratory and see if T - C can actually be synthesized . Time to set off stretching those diamonds , I guess .

Bark Watch