Move Over, Graphene - Carbyne is Here

MIT Technology Review reported that Mingjie Liu and a team of chemists from Houston’s Rice University have calculated the properties of carbyne, a form of carbon that is “stronger, stiffer and more exotic” than any material seen before — including diamonds and graphene.

As quoted in the market news:

For a start, [the researchers] say that carbyne is about twice as stiff as the stiffest known materials today. Carbon nanotubes and grapheme, for example, have a stiffness of 4.5 x 10^8 N.m/kg but carbyne tops them with a stiffness of around 10^9 N.m/kg.

Just 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.

Carbyne has other interesting properties too. Its flexibility is somewhere between that of a typical polymer and double-stranded DNA. And when twisted, it can either rotate freely or become torsionally stiff depending on the chemical group attached to its end.

Click here to read the full report from MIT Technology Review.