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Arising from N. Dubrovinskaia & L. Dubrovinsky Nature502,http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12620(2013)

Dubrovinskaia and Dubrovinsky1 question the sub-grain structure and ultrahigh hardness of our nanotwinned cubic boron nitride (nt-cBN; ref. 2), and make the following assertions: (1) hardening related to nanotwinning in cBN has been known for tens of years, (2) our X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman results do not show the signatures of nanotwinning, (3) there are large wurtzite-structure boron nitride (wBN) domains present in our samples, and (4) our hardness values are unconvincing. We argue below that all these claims are incorrect.

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Figure 1: Materials properties for representative nt-cBN (ref. 2) and ABNNC (ref. 3) samples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Metastable Materials Science and Technology, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, 066004, China

    Yongjun Tian, Bo Xu, Dongli Yu, Wentao Hu, Yufei Gao, Kun Luo, Zhisheng Zhao, Li-Min Wang, Bin Wen, Julong He & Zhongyuan Liu

  2. State Key Laboratory for Superhard Materials, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yanming Ma

  3. Center for Advanced Radiation Sources, University of Chicago, Chicago, 60439, Illinois, USA

    Yanbin Wang

  4. TEM Laboratory, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 87131, New Mexico, USA

    Yingbing Jiang

  5. School of Material Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300130, China,

    Chengchun Tang

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  1. Yongjun Tian
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Correspondence to Yongjun Tian.

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Tian, Y., Xu, B., Yu, D. et al. Tian et al. reply. Nature 502, E2–E3 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12621

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