Move Over, Graphene — Carbyne is Here

MIT Technology Review reported that Mingjie Liu and a team of chemists from Houston’s Rice University have calculated the properties of carbyne, a form of carbon that is “stronger, stiffer and more exotic” than any material seen before — including diamonds and graphene.

As quoted in the market news:

For a start, [the researchers] say that carbyne is about twice as stiff as the stiffest known materials today. Carbon nanotubes and grapheme, for example, have a stiffness of 4.5 x 10^8 N.m/kg but carbyne tops them with a stiffness of around 10^9 N.m/kg.

Just as impressive is the new material’s strength. Liu and co calculate that it takes around 10 nanoNewtons to break a single strand of carbyne. “This force translates into a specific strength of 6.0–7.5×10^7 N∙m/kg, again significantly outperforming every known material including graphene (4.7–5.5×10^7 N∙m/ kg), carbon nanotubes (4.3–5.0×10^7 N∙m/ kg), and diamond (2.5–6.5×10”7 N∙m/kg4),” they say.

Carbyne has other interesting properties too. Its flexibility is somewhere between that of a typical polymer and double-stranded DNA. And when twisted, it can either rotate freely or become torsionally stiff depending on the chemical group attached to its end.