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New Form of Carbon is Stronger Than Graphene and Diamond
- nakedrobot2 13y agoCarbyne? Good grief. What is coming next? Carbone, Carbonne, Carboon, Carborola? OK, joking aside. I am still waiting for Graphene to become used in any commercial application at all. For all its hype, nothing has been seen yet. Is it not yet economical to produce? When might Carbyne become used commercially, and what are the steps needed between now and that time?
- Falkvinge 13y agoCarbyne is a quite logical name, considering the -y- vowel (and even the -yne ending) is used to denote triple bonding between carbon atoms in organic chemistry. Compare ethane - ethyne (single bond - triple bond), for example.
- rorrr2 13y agoIt's your regular Org Chem nomenclature.
- DasIch 13y agoMolecules are given names after very specific rules, which allow you to identify the structure from the name alone. Those are not just made up by bored chemists.
- Roboprog 13y agoSo, no Corbomite next? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corbomite_Maneuver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corbomite_Maneuver
- louthy 13y agoMaybe 'Carbyne' was a spelling mistake, like the numerous others in that article!
- davidw 13y agoCarbonara :-)
- JonSkeptic 13y agoActually, I think 'Dimondium' is next, followed by 'Dimondillium'.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- thret 13y agoCarbyne and other myths about carbon http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/November/CarbyneOtherMythsAboutCarbon.asp http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/November/Carby...
- CountHackulus 13y agoThat article is from years ago, and this current article is based on a paper published a few weeks ago. Science advances.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoActually not so much. Reading the article it talks about the difference between trying to infer the possibility from the reality, and the OP is a theoretical result. Basically this stuff has never been seen "for real" as far as we (and scholar.google.com) seem to know. I did learn something new though, which is the exothermic properties of carbyne re-assembling itself into more stable configurations is pretty amazing. If nothing else, if you could make carbyne and stabilize it, and then destabilize it on demand, it would make for a heck of an explosive and one with presumably no nitrogen atoms. The implications of that are pretty obvious.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoThe implication is that we design a carbyne detector and get filthy rich selling it to the Department of Fatherland Carbyne.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoHeh, I like that idea. Since its highly improbable anyone will make one anytime soon, we can sell them a detector with meters and lights and screens maybe for millions of dollars, which can't detect anything but will have a perfect success record!
- cyphersanctus 13y agoApparently all of the carbyne related domains where available and then registered by someone soon after this was posted.
- fudged71 13y agoSquatters confuse and irritate me.
- Fuxy 13y agoWish nanotechnology would progress faster I'm really excited about the potential applications of these new materials.
- angersock 13y agoThe only real application at the moment is securing additional grant funding.
- rorrr2 13y agoI'm still waiting for cheap sheets of graphene.
- svantana 13y agoWhat are you going to do once you get that cheap sheet of graphene?
- shiftpgdn 13y agoIdeally build a space elevator.
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoA better quadcopter.
- rorrr2 13y agoI'd build stuff from them. Surf boards, bulletproof shirts and pants, whatever.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoLet's wait and see if it is the next chrysotile asbestos.
- brickmort 13y agofind something that can cut it.
- Groxx 13y agoMake a really conductive frisbee.
- joezydeco 13y agoGet rid of indium tin oxide in my touchscreens and use graphene as the base conductor.
- vaadu 13y ago"New Form of Carbon is Stronger Than Graphene and Diamond" "Chemists have calculated ... carbyne, should be stronger and stiffer than any known material" So which is it, 'it is stronger' or 'it should be stronger'?
- acadien 13y agoThe study is entirely based on first principles simulations. So even though these may be the most accurate calculations we can possibly carry out... they still may not be experimentally validated (for any number of reasons). In this case they cannot state anything as 100% truth as it has not (necessarily) been tested through experiment. "should" is appropriate.
- lutusp 13y ago> So which is it, 'it is stronger' or 'it should be stronger'? That language simply acknowledges that to date, the work is mostly theoretical -- they don't have enough material to perform empirical measurements. Another way to say it is that it's theoretically stronger, and it will probably be stronger in reality as well.
- Symmetry 13y ago"They agree that two chains in contact can react but there is an activation barrier that prevents this happening readily." So, it's really strong but if it ever actually breaks it will explode?
- derefr 13y agoIf I recall, the same is true of Gorilla Glass.
- Symmetry 13y agoI don't mean figuratively exploding as in shattering quickly into a large number of tiny fragments. I mean that I'm worried that it will literally explode, detonating or deflagrating, transforming into a different chemical substance and releasing a large amount of energy along the way.
- Dylan16807 13y agoIt sounds to me like a slow degradation, not anything that would runaway.
- Symmetry 13y agoI'm sure that it does degrade like that at normal temperatures. Normal explosives will also tend to degrade slowly over time as the chemical reactions that power their explosion also have a "activation barrier that prevents this happening readily". But as the temperature increases probability that any given molecular interaction will exceed that activation barrier increases. And if the activation barrier is exceeded, a chemical reaction happens that will release energy and increase the local temperature. In some substances if you increase the local temperature by enough there will be a runaway reaction which will quickly liberate all of the available chemical energy, an explosion. This all has to be triggered, but the strength of the substance makes me think that the energy involved in breaking it ought to be enough. Now, it might be that the energy required to get over the potential barrier is large enough compared to the energy released by the reaction that this doesn't happen. If there people with real chemistry experience here instead of just semiconductor physics and basic statistical mechanics I'd be grateful if they'd speak up. I'm mostly inferring from the prior beliefs of other chemists that this substance wouldn't be stable at all that it will tend to explode if given a chance.
- mistercow 13y agoI expect better writing from MIT Technology Review than to say something as vague as "stronger than diamond". I assume that they mean tensile strength, but it's important to actually say that.
- anigbrowl 13y agoJust as impressive is the new material’s strength. Liu and co calculate that it takes around 10 nanoNewtons to break a single strand of carbyne. “This force translates into a specific strength of 6.0–7.5×10^7 N∙m/kg, again significantly outperforming every known material including graphene (4.7–5.5×10^7 N∙m/ kg), carbon nanotubes (4.3–5.0×10^7 N∙m/ kg), and diamond (2.5–6.5×10”7 N∙m/kg4),” they say.
- oh_teh_meows 13y agoSince two chains of carbine coming in contact would explode, should the activation barrier be crossed, does this mean we can only use one chain at a time...i.e. no stringing together multiple chains to make something like say...the cable for a space elevator?
- ars 13y agoUnless we can keep it cold. An "activation barrier" is just another way of saying you need to heat it to make it burn. Or in other words: It's flammable, and the ignition temperature is right around room temperature.
- oh_teh_meows 13y agoSo we might need some sort of active cooling mechanism, considering how a space elevator cable, afaik, has to be anchored near the equator, which is typically hotter than room temperature? What if the cooling fails? I don't know much about QM or the chemistry of carbynes, but is it possible for some electrons to spontaneously jump over the activation barrier (despite being cooled) and start off some chain reaction that could jeopardize the entire space elevator cable?
- ars 13y ago> but is it possible for some electrons to spontaneously jump over the activation barrier (despite being cooled) and start off some chain reaction Probably not, because if they could then ordinary things would spontaneously catch fire too. (Maybe they do??)