Osmium is Stiffer than Diamond, Scientists Discover
Whether it will compete for the title of a girls best friend remains to be seen but the element osmium can already challenge diamond in at least one respect: stiffness. According to a report published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, osmium can withstand compression better than any known material. The results provide a potentially new lead in the search for superhard materials.
Diamonds ability to resist scratches, dents and chipping–in short, its hardness–makes it an ideal choice for tips in industrial strength machines. A related quality that is easier to calculate than hardness is an elements resistance to compression, as known as its bulk modulus. The properties are interrelated because the stiffest materials also tend to be the hardest ones. But even though osmium is much softer than diamond, initial estimates of its bulk modulus indicated a similar value to that of diamond.
Hyunchae Cynn and colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory thus set out to test the property experimentally. They squeezed osmium powder under 600,000 atmospheres of pressure and calculated changes in the spacing between atoms in the sample using x-ray diffraction patterns. The team reports that osmiums bulk modulus is 462 gigapascals (GPa) as compared to diamonds 443 GPa. “It is intriguing that a light, covalently bonded element such as diamond and a heavy, metallic element such as osmium, with very different chemical bonding, would both have large values of the bulk modulus,” the authors note. They conclude that related compounds such as transition metal carbides, nitrides and oxides could be sources of new superhard materials. —
Media Contact
All latest news from the category: Materials Sciences
Materials management deals with the research, development, manufacturing and processing of raw and industrial materials. Key aspects here are biological and medical issues, which play an increasingly important role in this field.
innovations-report offers in-depth articles related to the development and application of materials and the structure and properties of new materials.
Newest articles
Bringing Quantum Mechanics to Life
New ISTA assistant professor Julian Léonard makes abstract quantum properties visible. From the realm of the abstract to the tangible, the new assistant professor at the Institute of Science and…
Who moved my atom?
Researchers at the Technion Faculty of Physics have demonstrated controlled transfer of atoms using coherent tunneling between “optical tweezers”. An experimental setup built at the Technion Faculty of Physics demonstrates…
A milestone for reproductive medicine
Producing viable eggs from undeveloped oocytes through In vitro technology. Researchers successfully produce viable, embryo-forming egg cells from underdeveloped oocytes extracted from ovarian follicles. Mature egg cells, or oocytes, are…