It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials.
Because of its extremely high melting point, it’s impossible to use diamond as the starting point to synthesize diamond-like glass.However, the research team, led by Jilin University’s Bingbing Liu and Mingguang Yao—a former Carnegie visiting scholar—made their breakthrough by using a form of carbon composed of 60 molecules arranged to form a hollow ball.
Informally called a buckyball, this Nobel Prize-winning material was heated just enough to collapse its soccer-ball-like structure to induce disorder before turning the carbon to crystalline diamond under pressure.
Reference: “Ultrahard bulk amorphous carbon from collapsed fullerene” by Yuchen Shang, Zhaodong Liu, Jiajun Dong, Mingguang Yao, Zhenxing Yang, Quanjun Li, Chunguang Zhai, Fangren Shen, Xuyuan Hou, Lin Wang, Nianqiang Zhang, Wei Zhang, Rong Fu, Jianfeng Ji, Xingmin Zhang, He Lin, Yingwei Fei, Bertil Sundqvist, Weihua Wang and Bingbing Liu, 24 November 2021, Nature.November 23, 2021
November 23, 2021November 23, 2021November 23, 2021November 22, 2021