Diamonds, move over: Scientists make harder, brighter Q-carbon

  02 December 2015    Read: 1324
Diamonds, move over: Scientists make harder, brighter Q-carbon
Scientists have created a substance that blings even brighter than diamonds, but chances are you won`t wear it. You`ll take its byproducts as medicine instead.
It`s called Q-carbon, and researchers at North Carolina State University have made it by zapping a kind of loose carbon with a laser beam that lasts a fraction of a fraction of a blink of an eye -- 200 nanoseconds.

That`s only 200 billionths of a second, but it`s enough to heat the carbon to about 3,700 degrees Celsius. That`s not far from double the heat many scientist say it took to make natural diamonds when they were formed a billion or more years ago.

Then the researchers let that carbon cool immediately, snapping its atoms into a special crystalline structure.

The result is a new substance that may have never existed on Earth before and has some unique properties.

More about:


News Line