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Yale-Led Team Solves Half-Century Carbon-Crystal Mystery
slew writes "Unlike its more famous carbon cousins: diamonds and fullerenes, you've probably never heard of M-Carbon, but this form of compressed graphite which is as hard as diamonds has baffled researcher for half a century. Over the past few years, many theoretical computations have suggested at least a dozen different crystal structures for this phase of carbon, but new experiments showed that only one crystal structure fits the data: M-carbon."
Nice of TFS to not link to anything describing M-carbon.
Maybe this will help. Maybe it was "common knowledge", but I personally hadn't heard of the stuff till now.
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Though he has been baffled, his name has not been released.
How 'tough' is this M-carbon in comparison to diamond? Actual diamond is very hard, but its toughness is only average, and hence quite brittle like glass.
If it's tough and hard, we could be onto a winner.
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This is really badly written. It's missing several obvious and important pieces of data.
For example, what was the experiment they did in which they damaged diamond? The way it's described “Our study shows that M-carbon is extremely incompressible and hard, rivaling the extreme properties of diamond so much that it damages diamond,”, it sounds like the very existence of the material damages all diamond everywhere.
And what the heck is the crystal structure anyway? I know what the atomic arrangement of graphite is, and I know what the atomic arrangement of diamond is, but what the heck is 'M-Carbon'? How are the atoms arranged there? The article gives no clue.
And lastly, the article hints that after M-Carbon (whatever that is) has been created with extreme pressure, it stays that way even after the pressure is released. But it doesn't outright actually say it anywhere. Does it?
Three important and obvious questions that the article totally fails to address. All the while tossing around fluff data that's vaguely interesting, but ultimately not important, or tantalizing hints at important things, but no followup. It's annoying. The writer responsible for this piece ought to be given some obnoxious and menial task and then let out to re-write the piece periodically, repeating until it's actually halfway decent.
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When you cold press graphite you get new forms of carbon that are not graphite and are not diamond. It damages the diamond anvils in your compression apparatus, so it seems to be as hard as diamond. But nobody could figure out what the crystal structure was, even though several theoretical structures had been proposed. These guys have shown that only one of those structures, M carbon, fits the experimental data.
I started Googling and what I found is that some scientists have been playing with graphite and compressing it. They found that, at room temperature and high pressures, graphite goes from black to colorless and becomes very hard. They lacked the ability to determine the precise structure of the super hard carbon. They just knew it wasn't diamond.
Around the same time, some theoretical mineral physicists came up with some math that says that carbon can have any number of forms with different properties and configurations. These configurations were labeled with letters, lacking any pattern I can discern. (Maybe they labeled an initial list and then began disqualifying configurations?)
The article in the summary essentially is saying that they have linked the 2 bits of data and have determined that the super hard carbon is in fact the M carbon. Nothing I have found gives us any information on the duration of the M carbon once the pressure is removed or any properties of M carbon, except that the hardness is greater than diamond's. I guess we'll have to read the paper.
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can be found here http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120719/srep00520/full/srep00520.html (OPEN ACCESS).
It seems that the anisotropy does give a lower compressibility, but not dramatically more as in graphite (weaker plane compressibility is 2.7% of the stronger plane). It's also clear that the diamond in the diamond anvil cell used to make this is damaged by the material. The picture in the Yale News article is the damaged anvil, not the M-carbon. In SEM images, it doesn't look like graphite at all, but more like fused grains. Characterization and proof of structure is done by X-ray diffraction, a standard materials science method, using synchrotrons, which are giant particle accelerators, namely ALS at LBL and APS at Argonne.