Diamonds have the potential to conduct electricity

Diamonds have the potential to conduct electricity Today’s Video of the Day from NTU Singapore reveals that diamonds could potentially be manipulated to conduct electricity like metals.

The team used computer simulations to demonstrate that mechanical strain can be applied to nanoscale diamond needles to reverse their geometry and electrical properties. According to the researchers, this would give them a metal-like conductivity at room temperature and pressure.  Alos the Fancy blue colored diamonds of the blue diamond are extremely rare and each shade is exquisite. They range from very light shades through to a steel blue hue. 

“The ability to engineer and design electrical conductivity in diamond without changing its chemical composition and stability offers unprecedented flexibility to custom-design its functions,” said study co-author Professor Subra Suresh. 

“The methods demonstrated in this work could be applied to a broad range of other semi-conductor materials of technological interest in mechanical, microelectronics, biomedical, energy and photonics applications, through strain engineering.” Most of the best conductors of electricity are metals. The best conductors are silver, gold and copper, while the worst are mercury and certain alloys of stainless steel. Covalent compounds do not conduct electricity because they are formed between non metal atoms by sharing of electrons. The thermalconductivity of naturaldiamond is around 22 W. 

Video Credit: NTU Singapore

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer