Ties That Bind: Diamond Nanothreads With Phenomenal Strength Invented

Ties That Bind: Diamond Nanothreads With Phenomenal Strength Invented

Scientists have recently discovered how to develop ultra thin diamond nanothreads which possess amazing properties. This includes strength and stiffness which is many more times that of current nanotubes and polymers. These diamond nanothreads were discovered by a research team under John. V. Badding who is a Professor of Chemistry at Penn State. This finding was published in a recent issue of the journal entitled Nature Materials.

Professor Badding has led the team to discover the method to produce these diamond nanothreads, which are super strong and extremely thin. With extraordinary benefits such as stiffness and strength that far exceeds that of carbon nanotubes or conventional polymers of high strength, this could be the next big thing.

"From a fundamental-science point of view, our discovery is intriguing because the threads we formed have a structure that has never been seen before," Badding has been quoted as having said. The core of this diamond nanothread is really a long thin strand of carbon atoms which have been arranged much like the basic structure of an actual diamond.

This nanothread's structure is like a zig zag “cyclohexane” with rings of 6 carbon atoms which are bound together. Each atom is surrounded in a triangular-pyramid like structure resembling that of a tetrahedron. "It is as if an incredible jeweller has strung together the smallest possible diamonds into a long miniature necklace," Badding has been quoted as saying "Because this thread is diamond at heart, we expect that it will prove to be extraordinarily stiff, extraordinarily strong, and extraordinarily useful."

This team was able to come up with this amazing discovery following consistent efforts. Other labs had also tried to compress several separate carbon containing molecules like liquid benzene into a diamond like nanomaterial which is well ordered.

"We used the large high-pressure Paris-Edinburgh device at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to compress a 6-millimetre-wide amount of benzene -- a gigantic amount compared with previous experiments," according to Malcolm Guthrie who was also part of the research team and is from Carnegie Institution for Science He is a Co-author of the research paper and he explained how"We discovered that slowly releasing the pressure after sufficient compression at normal room temperature gave the carbon atoms the time they needed to react with each other and to link up in a highly ordered chain of single-file carbon tetrahedrons, forming these diamond-core nanothreads."

This is the first successful attempt at bring able to coax carbon atom containing molecules to join together and form a tetrahedral shape, the ends of which link with each other to form a long chain. The thread which has been discovered is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than a minute optical fibre. "Theory by our co-author Vin Crespi suggests that this is potentially the strongest, stiffest material possible, while also being light in weight," Badding has said.