(POPULAR MECHANICS) – Diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth — but on other planets, the jury is still out. That’s because for some 40 years, scientists have theorized that diamond can squeeze into an even harder mineral known as an eight-atom body-centered cubic, or BC8. If true, this ultra-dense form of carbon would likely be found on carbon-rich exoplanets and would have both a higher compressive strength and thermal conductivity than diamond.
Simply put, its discovery could be a game changer for a variety of industries, and now scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of South Florida (USF) using the Frontier supercomputer have found a possible pathway toward creating BC8. The results of the study were published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
“By efficiently implementing this potential on GPU-based (graphics processing unit) Frontier, we can now accurately simulate the time evolution of billions of carbon atoms under extreme conditions at experimental time and length scales,” USF professor and study co-author Ivan Oleynik said in a press statement. “We predicted that the post-diamond BC8 phase would be experimentally accessible only within a narrow high-pressure, high-temperature region of the carbon phase diagram.”
