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Harder Than Diamond? The New Hexagonal Diamond Breakthrough (EP 38)

Harder Than Diamond? The New Hexagonal Diamond Breakthrough (EP 38)

From First Principles vor 6 Monaten

0:00

57:59

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a deep
dive into one of the strangest and most hard-fought materials
science stories in decades: the claim that researchers have finally
synthesized bulk hexagonal diamond, also known as lonsdaleite. They
break down why this material matters, how it differs from ordinary
cubic diamond, why scientists argued about its existence for more
than 50 years, and what the new Nature paper actually did to
convince skeptical reviewers. Summary Why hexagonal diamond matters
— if real, it is a long-sought carbon phase that could be slightly
harder than conventional diamond and useful in extreme industrial
settings. The first-principles chemistry — carbon allotropes, x-ray
crystallography, cubic diamond, and the ABAB stacking that makes
hexagonal diamond different. The experimental breakthrough — how
the new team engineered around the default pathway to ordinary
diamond by controlling graphite orientation and pressure direction.
The controversy — why the peer review was intense, and how the new
paper relates to an earlier 2025 Nature paper with a similar claim.
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