DIAMOND’s crown has well and truly slipped. The “world’s hardest material” arguably lost its title a while ago to tough nanomaterials. Now a substance sometimes found in nature may beat them all – at 58 per cent harder than diamond.
Zicheng Pan at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and colleagues simulated how atoms in two materials respond when a fine-tipped probe pushes at them. The first, wurtzite boron nitride, is similar in structure to diamond but made of boron and nitrogen. The second, lonsdaleite, is made from carbon atoms like diamond but they are arranged differently. The simulation showed…
