Question: Do you know what a Q-Carbon is?

Christopher Blanford answered on 11 Mar 2016:

Hey, Matt covus

I’m glad you followed up. I work on graphene here (not all the time), so you really caught my interest.

I checked out the papers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4932622 http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4936595 (they might not be open access because the researchers are from outside the UK).

I’ll be honest, I’m a bit underwhelmed by how they studied it. I don’t know what year you’re in, but I’m going to drop the science on you now.

They studied the material using Raman spectroscopy, which looks for a distinct signature based on how the atoms in the substance vibrate. They used electron microscopy to look at how the atoms were arranged and how they were connected to each other.

Based on what’s presented, it looks a lot like diamond with a lot of defects in it, rather than a new allotrope. The mixture of materials seems to give it some pretty impressive properties, and they could be applied to places where diamond coatings are usually used (like on power tools).

Chris