News From the Field
Scientists Design New Super-Hard Material

April 19, 2007

Scientists developed a promising new approach for designing super-hard materials that are difficult to scratch or crack.The findings appear in the April 20 issue of Science. Most synthetic diamonds and other industrial-strength, super-hard materials are expensive and require extremely high-temperture, high-pressure conditions for their manufacture. By combining the atoms rhenium and boron in a simple, low-pressure process, researchers created a material hard enough to scratch diamond.  Full story

Source
University of California, Los Angeles

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