Diamond nanochains for building the space elevator

A few days before Rosh Hashanah I was invited to speak on television a few days ago about the scientific and technological discoveries that I wish for us in the new year. The question made me think deeply about the subject, and try to set priorities for various technological discoveries and developments. What is better: that the solar cells of a company Solar Roadways will reach a successful implementation on the roads, or a certain drug for breast cancer will pass the third stage of clinical trials, or perhaps an organization SpaceIL Will the Israeli succeed in landing a blue-white spacecraft on the moon?

In the end I decided that the question itself limits the thought. Scientific and technological developments do happen gradually, but what I would really wish for all of us for the new year is an impressive scientific discovery that opens up a new and exciting field that we didn't think was possible before. Discoveries of this kind happen all the time, and they are the ones that jump forward technology and humanity step by step, generation by generation. We cannot know when such jumps will occur, or from which laboratory or research institute they will come. We can only be sure that as long as the human race is busy researching and understanding the universe around them, they will continue to emerge.

And here, on the same day that I was asked to speak about the new year, a study made headlines that may herald just such a leap forward, and bring us into a new and more advanced era than the Stone, Bronze or Iron Age. If the hopes inherent in the new research are realized, it may jump us directly into the diamond age.

diamonds and necklaces

In the discovery, which was published a few days ago in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Materials (Nature Materials), scientists have revealed a way to produce thin diamond nanochains, whose hardness and strength may even rival those of diamonds and carbon nanotubes - one of the hardest materials known to man.

"From a basic science point of view, our discovery is intriguing because the chains we made have a structure that has never been seen before," said Prof. John Bading. The core of the resulting nanochains is made of a long, thin line of carbon atoms organized similarly to the basic structural unit of a diamond: carbon atoms, each of which is connected to four other carbon atoms in a stable pyramid-like structure. "It's as if an amazing jeweler has set the smallest possible diamonds into a long miniature necklace."

The group's discovery comes after almost a hundred years during which various laboratories tried in vain to compress compounds containing carbon atoms and cause them to break down and reassemble into a diamond-like shape. To this day Only products without an ordered and defined shape that repeats itself as a crystal were obtained. In the current experiment, the researchers used a special device to compress a large amount of benzene, at a pressure more than ten thousand times the atmospheric pressure we experience on Earth. The benzene molecules were squeezed together, bent and broken. So the researchers gradually reduced the pressure, thus giving the carbon atoms the time they needed to react with each other and form an ordered chain in a diamond-like structure. The width of the chain is minimal - only a few atoms connected to each other - and one hundred thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

from the Academy of Industry

The production method of the diamond chains is not yet suitable for industrial plants, because it requires the application of extremely high pressures on materials such as benzene. This fact may stop the development of the field in the industry in the first years, and limit the mass production capacity of the chains as a building material. I'm not excited about this limitation. Industrial processes are made possible when they are needed, even if the transition process from the laboratory to factories takes years. To date there has not yet been a good enough reason for the industry to research in this direction, but the potential importance of the tiny diamond necklaces is clear to all.

Because the fiber has a diamond-like structure, materials science theorists predict that it will be exceptionally hard, exceptionally strong, and exceptionally useful. "According to the theory... this is potentially the strongest and stiffest material possible, and also light weight." Bading said.

If researchers in academia and industry succeed in proving that this is really such a strong, hard and light material, and find cheap ways to produce it, then the field of materials and structures will undergo a revolution. The new diamond chains, which are derived from cheap benzene, will be able to be integrated into a wide variety of materials. We will find them in car doors and house walls, in airplane sides, and even in household hammers and saws. But the most exciting application for them may be found in space. For many decades, scientists and engineers around the world have been dreaming of a "space elevator" - a long rope connecting the Earth to outer space, on which elevators can climb and descend to bring people and cargo to space hotels, space stations and spaceships that set out on journeys to the moon, Mars and beyond. To date we have not been able to find a material that would be strong and available enough to make the rope. Carbon nanotubes were the only ones that came close to the strength needed, but the ways to distill and wrap them together in large enough quantities had not yet been found.

It is still too early to decide whether the diamond necklaces can be suitable for creating all of these, and in principle I prefer to wait for further studies that will confirm the current discovery, before I start with official jubilation. But one can hope that they will open a new and exciting field in material engineering. If this field continues to develop, it will carry us all into the new era that the nanotechnology researcher Ralph Merkel called "The Diamond Age". Just as the human race passed from the stone age to the bronze age and the iron age, so it will also pass to the diamond age, in which the structural materials that will be used by us will be stronger, harder and lighter than ever before.

Permutations of this type are not only reserved for periods from thousands of years ago. Just one hundred and thirty years ago, aluminum was more expensive than gold due to the difficulty of extracting it from the earth. at the most prestigious banquets in France At that time, the most distinguished guests were allowed to use aluminum dinnerware, while the rest had to make do with gold plates. Then a 'wild card' happened and a new and cheap method for producing aluminum was discovered. Within a few years, the price of aluminum dropped, so much so that today we use it in every house and in many accessories. In other words, today we enjoy wealth that a hundred years ago even the most affluent people could not have imagined.

Best wishes for the new year

I often wonder: What if a technological miracle happened? What if we found the biological switch in the body - some kind of gene - by activating it we would stop aging and getting sick? Or would we discover a formula that would turn water into oil? These ideas seem far-fetched to me, until I remember the discovery of the way to produce aluminum, the discovery of oil that replaced coal in many places, and the discovery of electricity that brought energy to every home. All these were breakthroughs and big surprises, for each generation in turn.

Therefore, I wish all of us as many surprises and scientific and technological breakthroughs as possible. I wish that repeated surprises will fall our way, each of which will surely contain the potential to improve the living conditions of all of us. And I wish that every week we hear quotes like Bading's - "Physicists and chemists are amazed that the atoms of the benzene molecules recombine themselves at room temperature to form a chain."

Have an amazing year.

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Source of quotes: Penn State University press release