Second attempt. Forgot the link in the first one for some reason...
Magnetic glowing carbon and a new state of matter, what's not to like ?
In 2015, Jagdish Narayan, and his colleagues at North Carolina State University revealed they had melted a non-crystalline form of carbon known as glassy-carbon with a rapid laser pulse, heating it to 3,700C (6690F) before rapidly cooling it. This cooling, or quenching, step led to the name Q-carbon. What they had produced was a strange, but exceptionally strong amorphous form of carbon. Unlike other forms of carbon it is magnetic and glows when exposed to light.
Dubrovinskaia’s new material is a unique form of carbon known as nanocrystalline diamond balls, and rather than being made from a single crystal lattice of carbon atoms it is made up of lots of tiny individual crystals – each 11,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – that are bound to each other by a layer of graphene, the Nobel Prize-winning wonder-material made of a carbon layer just one atom thick.
Already Dubrovinskaia and her colleagues have applied this to study osmium, a metal that is among the most resistant to being compressed in the world. They found it could resist compression pressures of over 750 GPa. At this point, the inner electrons, which are normally tightly bound to the nucleus of the metal atom and are highly stable, began to interact with each other. The researchers believe this strange behaviour could lead the metal to change from being a solid into a previously unknown state of matter. They hope to investigate what properties this gives osmium in the future.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160818-the-quest-to-make-a-crystal-harder-than-diamonds
You know you are living in the right universe when someone says "Unlike other forms of carbon it is magnetic and glows when exposed to light." with a straight face.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Dune's glowglobes are just around the corner (fill a strong/smart Q-carbon sphere with vacuum for buoyancy, have it navigate under some program).
This new phase of matter has exciting catalytic possibilities. Effective pH or electronegativity totally outside the range of bulk matter, and possibly outside the range of the active sites of enzymes. A step above cytochrome P450 (Nature's Blowtorch).