Helmholtz Center for Environmental

Emission-free driving, clean water, great progress in the fight against cancer and HIV - the wonders of technology solves all our problems?

The driver provides gas, the car accelerates, but from the exhaust stream is not the usual exhaust plumes, but only hot air. This is because of the unusual fuel instead of diesel or gasoline engines ignite in tiny metal particles, called nanoparticles of iron, aluminum or boron The combustion are oxides of a particle completely recovered. For this drive should be standard engines hardly modified.

Using innovative techniques and modern equipment group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Institute of Technology) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), United States conducted a direct measurement of the energy spectrum of charge carriers in grafene - so promising two-dimensional form of carbon, the properties that intrigue researchers now already 5 years old.

The results of experiments and equipment used for research, scientists have published in the journal Science (Observing the Quantization of Zero Mass Carriers in Graphene)

An international team of researchers, which included Russian, Chinese and American physicists, reported the receipt of new structural forms of carbon, for many physical properties located between graphite and diamond, and the hardness - even approaching the diamond.

The results of studies and projections, the authors reported online journal Nature.com (Carbon that cracks diamond).

The authors described a new form of carbon-M (M-carbon), because its crystal structure corresponds to monoclinic Syngony - one of the seven main crystallographic forms. M-carbon was obtained by compression of graphite into diamond grip with a force of 130 thousand atmospheres without heating. When reducing the pressure of the M-carbon can move into other forms.