Diamond is well known to be the strongest of all natural materials, but that strength comes at a price: brittleness. So an international team of researchers from MIT, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Korea was surprised to discover that when grown in extremely tiny, needle–like shapes, diamond can bend and stretch, much like rubber, and snap back to its original shape.
The team showed that narrow diamond needles, similar in shape to the rubber tips on the end of some toothbrushes but just a few hundred nanometers across, could flex and stretch by as much as 9 percent without breaking and then return to their original configuration. Ordinary diamond in macroscopic form stretches much less than 1 percent.
Putting crystalline materials such as diamond under very large elastic strains, as happens when these pieces flex, can change their mechanical, thermal, optical, magnetic, electrical, electronic, and chemical reaction properties in significant ways. The process could be used to design materials for specific applications through what’s known as “elastic strain engineering,” the team says.
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