Q-carbon

November 30, 2015 11:16 PM

Q-carbon is a new phase of solid carbon.
posted by klausman (45 comments total)

Hmm. XRD or it didn't happen...
I'm looking for the paper, because the press release doesn't say much, but I would expect at least some crystallographic info, if the authors concluded that it really is a new allotrope.
posted by Maxwell's demon at 11:36 PM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

So its harder than diamond, it can be made at room temperature, its magnetic and it glows when exposed to low levels of energy. De Beers aren't going to be happy!
posted by rongorongo at 11:42 PM on November 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

"De Beers aren't going to be happy!"

Also, each one sold reanimates a child soldier!

This seems pretty cool, though. I hope someone who's got a materials science background in crystals can talk more about whether the article's accurate.
posted by klangklangston at 11:46 PM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

You know where there's a lot of carbon we can use? in the atmosphere, that's where. Get cracking people -- glowing, magnetic diamonds for everyone, and the polar bears are saved!
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:51 PM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Another page from phys.org - this time with formatting and a picture.
posted by rongorongo at 11:53 PM on November 30, 2015

This is the clear material spaceships were made from in the Niven books, isn't it?
posted by maxwelton at 11:57 PM on November 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

I realized my first comment was a bit cute. What I meant to say, is that I hope this is correct, because that would be awesome, but I would like to see whether they have done X-ray diffraction on a sample to show that it really is an ordered crystal. Otherwise, I think it is probably some kind of mix of order and disorder, and not really a crystalline phase. I'm still looking for the peer-reviewed journal article. The press release says it will be published in the Nov 30 issue of Journal of Applied Physics, which isn't available yet.
posted by Maxwell's demon at 11:59 PM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

So, you can say they've ... altered... the carbon?

I expect interesting technology developments in the years to come.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:59 PM on November 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

Here's a paper they published in APL Materials back in October: Direct conversion of amorphous carbon into diamond at ambient pressures and temperatures in air.
posted by rongorongo at 12:00 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

So...light sabers?
posted by bird internet at 12:09 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I think a better title for that paper would be "We converted graphite to diamond by blasting it with a laser". Anything that results in temperatures over 4000K can hardly be called ambient.
posted by Maxwell's demon at 12:10 AM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

New form of carbon? POTENTIAL VIABLE SPACE ELEVATOR CABLE: YES OR NO?
posted by Ryvar at 12:18 AM on December 1, 2015 [7 favorites]

Well, I'll just wait to see which side of this Chick-Fil-A comes down on.
posted by jimmythefish at 12:20 AM on December 1, 2015

Is this a new form in addition to graphite, diamonds, and bucky balls?
posted by persona au gratin at 12:29 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

With luck, it will be like ice-nine and will crystallise carbon right out of the atmosphere!

Wait, that might be a problem....
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:29 AM on December 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

Maxwell's Demon,

Lasers violate all our normal assumptions. 4000K for femtoseconds just on the surface is totally in the realm of possibility.
posted by effugas at 3:14 AM on December 1, 2015

Yeah, anything that goes "And there are all these great applications!" but doesn't have a decent description of what the stuff is... reminds me of Pons and Fleishmann. Et al.

Not for a second I'm suggesting anything like this here. But I too went lolloping down that press release looking for structure or material information, as opposed to 'we hit it with a laser and now it glows!'. Could be fab. Who doesn't want new shiny? Can't tell from this, though.
posted by Devonian at 3:38 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Researchers find new phase of carbon, make diamond at room temperature
[impressive picture of not that]
posted by Wolfdog at 3:40 AM on December 1, 2015 [7 favorites]

Lasers violate all our normal assumptions. 4000K for femtoseconds just on the surface is totally in the realm of possibility.

Oh, I accept that all right. Local pressures were probably pretty high during those femtoseconds as well. Now we're just talking about the same high P and T in which diamonds are usually made.

It looks like the DOI listed in the phys.org press release has a problem with it- I think the publicity machine got a little ahead of itself.
posted by Maxwell's demon at 5:21 AM on December 1, 2015

Another page from phys.org - this time with formatting and a picture.

The picture is just of normal diamonds, though. The caption gives no notion that they're "Q-carbon"
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:21 AM on December 1, 2015

They were just diamonds we had lying around.
posted by mittens at 5:27 AM on December 1, 2015 [4 favorites]

"We know a lot about diamond, so we can make diamond nanodots."

The first three times I read this I swear it said diamond nanobots
posted by oulipian at 5:42 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

New form of carbon? POTENTIAL VIABLE SPACE ELEVATOR CABLE: YES OR NO?

Not sure about this material, but there is another recent study looking towards that goal.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:57 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

you know who else is harder than diamond, can be made at room temperature, is magnetic and glows when exposed to low levels of energy and starts with a q?
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 6:04 AM on December 1, 2015 [7 favorites]

John De Lancie?
posted by Wolfdog at 6:11 AM on December 1, 2015 [10 favorites]

So if I hand my wife a lump of coal and shoot her with a laser she'll have a new diamond ring?
posted by jim in austin at 6:47 AM on December 1, 2015

Wait, "third" phase of carbon? Are buckyballs not a thing anymore?
posted by surazal at 7:02 AM on December 1, 2015

So can I now afford diamonds on the soles of my shoes?
posted by Splunge at 7:19 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

i) Not bulk material, "The end result is a film of Q-carbon, and researchers can control the process to make films between 20 nanometers and 500 nanometers thick."

ii) They are using this to make tiny nanodiamonds, by some form of epitaxy or phase change. Nanodiamonds - their synthesis and manipulation has been reported in hundreds of ways and for years.

iii) Also: a few SEMs, no xrd or even saxs? meh.

iv) This is breathless reporting as usual.
posted by lalochezia at 7:27 AM on December 1, 2015 [4 favorites]

I can't find the JoAP reference, but the APL Mater. reference does mention quenched carbon (Q-carbon) as an intermediate step toward creating nanodiamonds. The abstract is pretty straightforward:

We report on fundamental discovery of conversion of amorphous carbon into diamond by irradiating amorphous carbon films with nanosecond lasers at room-temperature in air at atmospheric pressure. We can create diamond in the form of nanodiamond (size range <1>100 nm). Nanosecond laser pulses are used to melt amorphous diamondlike carbon and create a highly undercooled state, from which various forms of diamond can be formed upon cooling. The quenching from the super undercooled state results in nucleation of nanodiamond. It is found that microdiamonds grow out of highly undercooled state of carbon, with nanodiamond acting as seed crystals.

I agree that the reporting is overly dramatic, but the paper is pretty interesting. Granted, it's not the paper that is being discussed. Weird that I can't find the main reference. Do they delay the JoAP online archive?
posted by blurker at 7:59 AM on December 1, 2015

Wait, "third" phase of carbon? Are buckyballs not a thing anymore?

I think this comes down to the difference between allotrope and phase. An allotrope is a distinct form of an element, like ozone vs normal oxygen. It may or may not also be a distinct crystalline phase, like graphite vs. diamond. Buckyballs and such are allotropes of carbon, but as far as I know, they don't have distinct crystalline forms.
posted by Maxwell's demon at 8:08 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Going to the J. Appl. Phys. website and entering the full title as reported by the press release results in nothing found. Looks like the NC State press folks got a little ahead of themselves. No way to comment on this in an informed way until the paper is actually published, so I'd hold off on the Science! type celebrations.
posted by Existential Dread at 8:27 AM on December 1, 2015

I'm glad we're talking about this for two reasons: it gives me a chance to be grumpy about science-by-press release, and it made me go look at the Journal of Applied Physics. It's cool that the authors chose an open access journal for this (soon to be published?) paper. Open access is awesome- anyone who wants to can go read the paper, for free. You've already paid for the research, after all.
posted by Maxwell's demon at 8:37 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

The glowing bit is interesting... Could be an alternative for OLEDs.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 9:32 AM on December 1, 2015

I never think about it as a tech school, but NC State really has been doing some pretty awesome science in the past few years. It should get more credit than it does.
posted by maryr at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2015

If they can make a thin film of diamond, I'd like that on the screen of my smartphone please

C'mon, Apple, get on this stat.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:20 AM on December 1, 2015

If they can make a thin film of diamond, I'd like that on the screen of my smartphone please

They already tried with sapphire and failed.
posted by Existential Dread at 10:22 AM on December 1, 2015

Existential Dread: "If they can make a thin film of diamond, I'd like that on the screen of my smartphone please

They already tried with sapphire and failed."

That article doesn't exactly read as failure to me. It's more like, sapphire is a proven technology but GT Advanced Technology could not produce the quantity of screens at the quality needed. That's not a tech issue, that's a production issue.
posted by Splunge at 10:44 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, in this case it's a business failure. Unfortunately, in my experience business failures can be more difficult to overcome than technical failures.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:12 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Supermarket checkout bar-code scanners are made with sapphire-laminated glass. Just carry one of those around instead of a smartphone.
posted by XMLicious at 12:42 PM on December 1, 2015

glowing, magnetic diamonds for everyone, and the polar bears are saved!

We could make diamond-and-carbon-fiber armor for the polar bears. They'd kill us all, but damn, would it look cool.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:17 PM on December 1, 2015

Panserbjørne!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:56 PM on December 1, 2015

Maxwell's Demon:

If you want to verify that there's a crystalline structure, I've often found that the easiest approach for question like this is to email the researcher mentioned in the story. When I figure the information I'm looking for would be in a yet-unpublished paper, I ask for a preprint; otherwise I just ask the question I'm curious about.

As a general rule, academics love to talk about their work to anyone who seems to be genuinely interested. (Given how much of their professional time is allocated to trying to talk about topics underlying their work, to apathetic undergrads...)
posted by kiwano at 8:22 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Looks like the paper is up. It's definitely interesting- especially the ferromagnetic part. It took me a while to convert their funky cgs units to SI, but it looks something like 1/10th the magnetic strength of iron, which is surprisingly strong. Otherwise, it looks like a really dense amorphous (non-crystalline) phase with many diamond-like properties. The TEM picture of the disordered atoms with a little patch of ordered diamond was particularly cool. They said they did XRD, but didn't show the results- probably because it would just show the amorphous character. Tldr, carbon is awesome! Also, thanks to this thread, I learned that there is another form of crystalline carbon, hexagonal diamond, or lonsdaleite, which is named for one of the pioneers of crystallography, Kathleen Lonsdale. Thanks, Metafilter!
posted by Maxwell's demon at 11:48 PM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've often found that the easiest approach for question like this is to email the researcher mentioned in the story.

This. I've found a lot of academic PR is simply bad with science and technology. There are structural problems that make it so - a media/web hungry for magical boffinry; universities have a very large media exposure area, because everybody has to publish; institutions have an even worse appreciation of how to run media comms than companies do, and spend less; there are lots of different things to cover, far more so than in a commercial organisation - but the result is a LOT of very unhelpful stuff gets out.

It is intensely frustrating, if you're writing about this stuff, because the original gee-whizz-white-coats-change-world story spreads really quickly and by the time you've got hold of the researchers and found what the science actually is, and what the parameters of the story actually are, the circus has moved on.

But, ya gotta. And researchers - up to a point - are generally delighted to help, because they actually care about the science (duh!) and actively want it to be properly reported, even if it's a lot more nuanced and has factors that largely contradict the PR spin. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a "Technology X could mean entire world knowledge stored in your tooth" story about some new solid-state physics and said to myself "But doesn't that stuff only work at like -270k?". And yes, you talk to the researcher and they send the actual paper and the boffo new thing is just dandy in liquid helium but who knows how or whether it'll ever work at ambient. Which the press release neglected to mention.

The truth is out there. But do dodge the flacks.
posted by Devonian at 3:38 AM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]