The tip of a nano-indenter presses down on a forest of nanodiamonds Yang Lu, Amit Banerjee, and Hongti Zhang
Diamond is the hardest known naturally occurring material. It’s nearly impossible to compress or scratch. But it can bend.
While diamonds are hard to scratch, they’re not so difficult to shatter – usually, trying to bend a diamond results in it fracturing. Now, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have made tiny diamond needles that can bend by up to 9 per cent without breaking, and then snap back to their original position.
The researchers…
Article amended on 11 May 2018
We corrected what did the bending.
