Supercomputer figures out how to make ‘super-diamond’

By Dean Murray via SWNS

A supercomputer has worked out how to make the strongest material on Earth.

However, scientists would have to fly to an exoplanet to produce the so-called "super-diamond".

To create BC8, an eight-atom body-centered cubic crystal exhibiting a 30% greater resistance to compression than diamond, would require conditions found in the center of carbon-rich exoplanets.

These celestial bodies, characterized by considerable mass, experience gigantic pressures reaching millions of atmospheres in their deep interiors.

“Consequently, the extreme conditions prevailing within these carbon-rich exoplanets may give rise to structural forms of carbon such as diamond and BC8,” said Ivan Oleynik, a physics professor at the University of South Florida (USF) and senior author of a paper recently published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. “Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the properties of the BC8 carbon phase becomes critical for the development of accurate interior models of these exoplanets.”

Professor Oleynik and colleagues used Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer, located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, to run multi-million atomic molecular-dynamics simulations.

Oleynik said: "By efficiently implementing this potential on GPU-based Frontier, we can now accurately simulate the time evolution of billions of carbon atoms under extreme conditions at experimental time and length scales."

However, conditions for the creation of BC8 are not currently possible on Earth.

“Despite numerous efforts to synthesize this elusive carbon crystalline phase, including previous National Ignition Facility (NIF) campaigns, it has yet to be observed,” said Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist Marius Millot, who also was involved in the research. “But we believe it may exist in carbon-rich exoplanets.”

“The BC8 phase of carbon at ambient conditions would be a new super-hard material that would likely be tougher than diamond,” said Oleynik.

LLNL scientist and co-author Jon Eggert said the most important reason that diamond is so hard is that the tetrahedral shape of the four nearest neighbor atoms in the diamond structure perfectly matches the optimal configuration.

He said: "The BC8 structure maintains this perfect tetrahedral nearest-neighbor shape, but without the cleavage planes found in the diamond structure.

"The BC8 phase of carbon at ambient conditions would likely be much tougher than diamond.”

An LLNL statement adds: "The team dreams of one day growing BC8 super-diamond in the laboratory if only they can synthesize the phase and then recover a BC8 seed crystal back to ambient conditions."