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Fractured diamond can heal itself at room temperature

Nature Materials volume 22, pages 1292–1293 (2023)Cite this article

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Self-healing behaviour in a nanotwinned diamond composite, at room temperature, has been quantitatively evaluated through tensile testing. The phenomenon is shown to arise from a transition of atomic interactions from repulsion to attraction and the formation of nanoscale diamond ‘osteoblasts’, in analogy to the process of bone healing in living organisms.

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Fig. 1: Self-healing in ntDC nanobeams.

References

  1. Huang, Q. et al. Nanotwinned diamond with unprecedented hardness and stability. Nature 510, 250–253 (2014). This paper reports that nanotwinned diamond with an average twin thickness of approximately 5 nm has unprecedented hardness (approximately 200 GPa) and thermal stability.

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This is a summary of: Qiu, K. et al. Self-healing of fractured diamond. Nat. Mater. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01656-4 (2023).

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Fractured diamond can heal itself at room temperature. Nat. Mater. 22, 1292–1293 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01665-3

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