Hard Enough To Scratch Diamond

I thought this was kind of cool: a new material, ReB2, has been developed that is hard enough to scratch diamond.

Interestingly, it is twice as hard in some directions (crystal planes) as in the others, and there's now a theory as to why.

There may not be a lot of applications for scratching diamonds, but it's kind of cool that we could if we wanted to. And the theoretical work on what makes materials super-hard will come in useful when it's time to develop nanomachines based on covalent solids - highly cross-linked molecules. I suspect that super-hard surfaces might turn out to have useful low-friction and low-wear properties.

Chris Phoenix

Comments

[Don Monroe]

Thanks for noticing the story I wrote, Chris. I said a little bit more about the subject on my blog, including linking (Science subscribers only, I'm afraid) to some criticism of the "scratching diamond" observations.

[todd]

I would assume this would have military applications in armor penetrating ammunition.