Boston: In a first, scientists have found that diamond can bend and stretch much like rubber, and snap back to its original form when grown in extremely tiny, needle-like shapes.
Diamond is well-known as the strongest of all natural materials, and with that strength comes another tightly linked property: brittleness.
The finding by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US could open the door to a variety of diamond-based devices for applications such as sensing, data storage, actuation, biocompatible in vivo imaging, optoelectronics, and drug delivery. For example, diamond has been explored as a possible biocompatible carrier for delivering drugs into cancer cells.
Published in the journal Science, the research shows that the 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 nine per cent without breaking, then return to their original configuration.
Ordinary diamond in bulk form, and has a limit of well below one per cent stretch, said MIT postdoc Daniel Bernoulli.