Why harder-than-diamond materials matter

1:58about a material that, in theory, is harder than the hardest known material, which is conventional diamond. This is an upgrade on diamonds that we normally have on our ring finger and things like that. The current benchmark for the hardest material is a conventional diamond, and here we've gone a step further. So, it's a very big deal because in industry, diamonds are applied all over the place, okay? It's not just used as jewelry. In fact, the the reason why a diamond is so expensive is because the jewelers are artificially crunching the supply while the demand is really high because of all of Hollywood and pop culture and things

2:39like that. But, diamond in its core is really effective in all sorts of industry. For example, diamond um diamond-tipped drill bits. They can bore through rock for any type of stuff, oil exploration mining anything. Diamond-coated cutting tools, they can machine aerospace-grade titanium. Titanium is a hard metal, but if you've got a diamond-coated saw, you can cut through titanium. Diamond windows, they protect infrared sensors in military systems. And the other cool one that I hadn't really thought about was diamond heat sinks. So, >> Oh, interesting. >> diamond is a really good insulator, and it's also a really good heat sink in the

3:20in the in the means that like it can extract heat out of its environment and dump it to something else. And those are being explored for next-generation computer chips because silicon is sort of meeting its thermal limit when it comes to heat dissipation. This is why everyone is saying that, you know, the data centers up in space won't work is because silicon is really bad at dissipating heat. >> Right. >> We have to have giant cooling systems in order to do that. Well, if you have a chip that has integrated silicon and diamond to manage that heat dissipation, you could now push even further, right, on how big you can make a server rack and things like that. And so, we desperately need these types of

4:02materials. Diamond is one of these things, and imagine now you can make an upgraded diamond that's going to upgrade all of these in in industrial applications, right? And the other reason why this matters, this particular story, is because for the longest time computational simulations, meaning I take the material, I take all of the atoms and the arrangements of that material, I put that into a computer, and I ask the computer to just churn Schrödinger's equations and the what we know about physics and material physics. If we do that in computer simulation, the simulation suggests that this thing is real. >> Mhm. >> But for the longest time, we don't have

4:43any material samples to analyze. And so, there's a fundamental problem now because our physics of what a material should look like is saying one thing, and we've never been able to do it. So, it's almost like a bedrock foundational problem for the field. That >> theoretically, this thing should be possible. Why is it so hard? And is it even possible, right? Because if if it's if it's truly not, then we have to go back to the drawing board on fundamental material science. And that is so a very uncomfortable scenario >> Right. >> for everyone in the field. >> Right. >> Right? >> Yes. >> And so, the status now is we've got a team in China that's synthesized millimeter-sized

5:23pure hexagonal diamond, and it's resolving this 50-year academic debate. This happened earlier as well in 2005, as you alluded to, we covered a story in >> 25 20 2025. >> Yeah, 2025, sorry. We covered a story last year that purportedly made hexagonal diamond. This is another research team in China that is doing the same thing, maybe a bit better, and we'll get into some of the drama there because there's a lot of drama and it's quite hilarious. >> the tea, everybody. >> Okay. So, let's start from the basics. >> Yes. >> Carbon.