New form of superhard carbon observed

http://www.physorg.com ^ | 11 Oct 2011 | Provided by Carnegie Institution

[Aevery_Freeman]

The applications are legion AND it is a use for carbon. In your face Al Gore!

Politicians seem psychologically incapable of understanding how limited their thinking is compared to the producers.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks KoRn.

The team created the new carbon allotrope by compressing glassy carbon to above 400,000 times normal atmospheric pressure.

Wow!

Sounds like a nice, lightweight, hard projectile.

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[bvw]

It is an amorphous material, meaning that its structure lacks the long-range order of crystals.

That's speculation, I'm guessing.

One clue is "long range order of crystals", like what is that supposed to mean? Probably not enough of the material has been extensively tested yet.

[bvw]

Here’s some bvw dreamland speculations. In such dense fermi-level locked structures, we can quantumly entangle some nuclei and have bound nuclei that become a quantum-resonant mix of nitrogen and carbon. That entanglement might make the structures defiant of X-Ray crystallography, and make it look amorphous, when actually it’s just a denser diamond lattice. You might be able to measure this by decay rates if you have some C-14 in there.

[allmost]

They lie.