Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 12 May 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.446
News
Carbon that cracks diamond
A new ultra-hard form of carbon may exist between graphite and diamond.
Carbon can exist in a form halfway between graphite and diamond, say researchers in China and the United States. And they believe this stuff is as hard as diamond itself.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
There were two oversights in this piece, I fear. One was that credit should be given to Tetsuo Irifune at Ehime University in Japan and his coworkers who reported ultrahard polycrystalline diamond in 2003 (Nature 421, 599; 2003) that is essentially the same as the product reported in 2005 by Dubrovinskaia et al. Second, the authors of ref. 1 estimated the hardness of their material using a model described in their ref. 32, and did not simply rely on bulk modulus to estimate this. That was acknowledged by Neil Ashcroft in his comments to Nature, and any implication to the contrary was our mistake. I apologise for these oversights.