A new technique for creating diamonds
In discovering a new solid state for carbon scientists have also discovered that it is a relatively inexpensive way to produce diamonds.
Professor Jay Narayan of North Carolina State University is the lead author of three papers describing the work that sees Q-carbon join the growing list of carbon solids, a list that includes graphite, graphene, fullerene, amorphous carbon and diamond. He has suggested that the only place Q-carbon might be found in the natural world is in the core of certain planets.
The researchers created Q-carbon by starting with a thin plate of sapphire (other substrates, such as glass or a plastic polymer, will also work). Using a high-power laser beam, they coated the sapphire with amorphous carbon, a carbon form with no defined crystalline structure. They then hit the carbon with the laser again, raising its temperature to about 4,000 Kelvin, and then rapidly cooled, or quenched, the melted carbon. This stage of quenching is where “Q” in Q-carbon comes from.
The researchers have found that, depending on the substrates, tiny diamonds will form within the Q-carbon, suggesting to me that they have actually discovered how diamonds are formed deep below the Earth. The hot high pressure environment there allows Q-carbon to naturally form, and in the process of its solidification diamonds are a byproduct.
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In discovering a new solid state for carbon scientists have also discovered that it is a relatively inexpensive way to produce diamonds.
Professor Jay Narayan of North Carolina State University is the lead author of three papers describing the work that sees Q-carbon join the growing list of carbon solids, a list that includes graphite, graphene, fullerene, amorphous carbon and diamond. He has suggested that the only place Q-carbon might be found in the natural world is in the core of certain planets.
The researchers created Q-carbon by starting with a thin plate of sapphire (other substrates, such as glass or a plastic polymer, will also work). Using a high-power laser beam, they coated the sapphire with amorphous carbon, a carbon form with no defined crystalline structure. They then hit the carbon with the laser again, raising its temperature to about 4,000 Kelvin, and then rapidly cooled, or quenched, the melted carbon. This stage of quenching is where “Q” in Q-carbon comes from.
The researchers have found that, depending on the substrates, tiny diamonds will form within the Q-carbon, suggesting to me that they have actually discovered how diamonds are formed deep below the Earth. The hot high pressure environment there allows Q-carbon to naturally form, and in the process of its solidification diamonds are a byproduct.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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As far as I can tell from a wide range of articles on this subject, including the NCU team’s paper:
1.) This is dependent on speedy (nanosecond) heating above the Phase Transition, followed by rapid cooling sufficient (The quenching from which the Q in Q-carbon comes) that there is a permanent shift in which electrons in the Carbon atoms do the binding to each other.
2.) The descriptions of the amorphous carbon used as the starting material spread over the substrate is, …lacking in clarity. The descriptions for amorphous carbon I could find are similarly vague.
3.) The final material imaged, so far, is *not* a sheet of Q-carbon, but a collection of small crystalline objects lying in the same thin layer above the substrate.
4.) The ferromagnetism, and even the fluorescence, is interesting, but not what will help us in spaceflight. For that we will need something with the compressive strength of diamond, in sheets, that will bind to either carbon nanotubes, or graphene. These would be in sheets laid between and bonded to, layers of a q-carbon matrix. They will provide the tensile strength and toughness to go with the matrix compressive strength and hardness of the Q-carbon, or the diamond created from it. Such composite materials could make space vehicles far beyond the performance possible today.
Whether these materials can become possible will be a strong investigative field.
I think we both know that the reason some aspects of this process are described “vaguely” is to protect the significant financial value of the process. No reason to give it away when you can quite rightly make many millions selling it to those who need and want it.