Hexagonal Diamond: Myth or Reality? #shorts

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]What a banger of a title. The definition of a clapback.

[00:00:04]>> Yes. Imagine you've spent about 50 years arguing about whether a legendary material exists. Finally, someone has made it. And that's roughly the situation when it comes to hexagonal diamond. This is an upgrade on diamonds.

[00:00:17]There's been debate about whether it even exists. This is what diamond looks like at the atomic scale. Each carbon atom is attached to four other carbon atoms. The repetitive unit is in the shape of a cube.

[00:00:29]>> Yes. Hence, normal diamond is called a cubic diamond. Now, in 1962, researchers predicted that there would be a possible hexagonal polymorph that is even more stable and hard. The question is, is that real? There were people who were analyzing a meteorite that fell in Arizona 50,000 years ago. There is Meteor Crater right next to the 40 freeway. I was there when I was very young. There's a lot of carbon in meteors. When they hit the earth, perhaps the carbon is going to form a weird allotrope. So, in 1967, a paper came out, again in Nature, saying that they found that hexagonal polymorph.

[00:01:05]They named it lonsdaleite. They did x-ray diffraction on this thing, and they showed that it has the same pattern as something called wurtzite, which is a zinc sulfur mineral that has hexagonal symmetry. Just imagine, instead of the two different colors, which are zinc and sulfur, Yeah. all of them are carbon atoms. Look at the unit cell, hexagonal prism. Yes.

[00:01:22]>> So, okay, discovered in the 1960s, like, okay, I think we found it, right? In the 1960s, in parallel, GE, the company, they achieved the first lab diamonds.

[00:01:30]People start making lab-grown diamonds, and now we want to make lonsdaleite. But there's a lot of problems, and there's no real definitive proof. Because with all of this comes skepticism. How come every time I'm trying to make diamond, I always get cubic diamond?

[00:01:43]>> Right.

[00:01:44]>> Which is the stuff that I see on earth.

[00:01:45]You're telling me this is meteor has it, but like even the meteorite sample might not be that good, and that's where we come to 2014. Nature Communications, lonsdaleite does not exist as a discrete material. What a banger. Put in the title, does not exist, [laughter] when for like the past 40, 50 years, people have been like talking about how this is a thing.

[00:02:03]>> Yes. He's saying that lonsdaleite is just cubic diamond, but with something called stacking faults. If you look at the meteorite samples, there's a bunch of cubic diamond, but that cubic diamond lattice structure is not contiguous.

[00:02:15]There's like cubic diamond here, and then there's another domain over here, and the boundary between them is slightly offset.

[00:02:21]>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are these stacking faults, these boundaries, right? So, when I put this through x-ray diffraction, I am going to get artifacts that suggest there is hexagonal diamond.

[00:02:30]And so, you're not actually making hexagonal diamond, you're just making a bunch of cubic diamond with defects.

[00:02:35]Fugazi. Yeah. Meanwhile, computational studies are refusing to give up. The theory says lonsdaleite should be real.

[00:02:40]The carbon atoms are all happy. They don't want to go into another phase. The experiment says, "Nah." This is where we get into this paper. Bulk hexagonal diamond. Team in China that synthesized millimeter-sized pure hexagonal diamond, and it's resolving this 50-year academic debate.