Tougher than armour, hard as diamond: China’s unbreakable crystal breakthrough

Scientists use carbon nanotubes to build an internal support structure that overcomes the brittle glasslike nature of diamonds Chinese scientists have created a diamond with no Achilles’ heel – one that cannot be broken, even by a hard knock with a hammer – according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Synthesis. While a diamond is the hardest natural material on Earth, it has a major weakness. It is brittle, like glass, and a sharp blow can shatter it. For years, scientists have tried to make diamonds tougher without losing their legendary hardness. Typically, increasing one characteristic has meant sacrificing the other – seen as a reasonable trade-off for most applications, which include industrial uses such as in cutting and polishing tools. The team – from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beihang University – found a way around this limitation, building an internal support structure to boost a diamond’s toughness by six times while leaving its hardness unchanged. The breakthrough material is even tougher than the tungsten alloys used in armour-piercing ammunition, according to the paper, which was published online on July 9.

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