{"id":235676,"date":"2026-04-21T22:20:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T03:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/put-a-nanodiamond-under-intense-pressure-and-it-becomes-flexible"},"modified":"2026-04-21T22:20:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T03:20:40","slug":"put-a-nanodiamond-under-intense-pressure-and-it-becomes-flexible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/put-a-nanodiamond-under-intense-pressure-and-it-becomes-flexible","title":{"rendered":"Put a nanodiamond under intense pressure and it becomes flexible"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/put-a-nanodiamond-under-intense-pressure-and-it-becomes-flexible.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Diamond is among the hardest naturally occurring substances on Earth, but if you shrink it down to the nanoscale, it is surprisingly elastic. And that could be useful for a host of applications such as quantum computing. In a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prx\/abstract\/10.1103\/b3h5-34wt\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Physical Review X<\/i>, Chongxin Shan at Zhengzhou University in China and colleagues studied diamonds as small as four nanometers across to see how they respond to pressure.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists already know that nanodiamonds, which are thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand, can survive being stretched or squeezed in ways that destroy a regular diamond. But nobody knew how.<\/p>\n<p>So the team placed individual nanodiamonds (ranging from 4 to 13 nanometers across) inside a transmission electron microscope between two diamond indenters and compressed them. These were connected to a sensor that measured how strongly each nanodiamond resisted being squeezed while a high-resolution camera imaged diamond atoms as they moved. The researchers backed up their observations with computer simulations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diamond is among the hardest naturally occurring substances on Earth, but if you shrink it down to the nanoscale, it is surprisingly elastic. And that could be useful for a host of applications such as quantum computing. In a paper published in the journal Physical Review X, Chongxin Shan at Zhengzhou University in China and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,4,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-nanotechnology","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}