The Rice researchers behind a new study that explains the creation of nanodiamonds in treated coal also show that some microscopic diamonds only last seconds before fading back into less-structured forms of carbon under the impact of an electron beam. The research by Rice chemist Ed Billups and his colleagues appears in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. A series of images shows a small nanodiamond (the dark spot in the lower right corner) reverting to anthracite. Rice University scientists saw nanodiamonds form in hydrogenated coal when hit by the electron beam used in high-resolution transmission electron microscopes. But smaller diamonds like this one degraded with subsequent images. The scale bar is 1 nanometer. (Credit: Billups Lab/Rice University) Billups and Yanqiu Sun, a former postdoctoral researcher in his lab, witnessed the interesting effect while working on ways to chemically reduce carbon from anthracite coal and make it soluble. First they noticed nanodiamonds forming amid the amorphous, hydrogen-infused layers of graphite. It happened, they discovered, when they took close-ups of the coal with an electron microscope, which fires an electron beam at the point of interest. Unexpectedly, the energy input congealed clusters of hydrogenated carbon atoms, some of
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