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We hope this will not make mobile phones more expensive!

Diamonds are often hailed as one of the strongest materials in the world. However, strength can be measured in countless ways. Diamond is one of the hardest materials on the planet, forged under the high temperature and pressure of the earth. But they are also expensive, which makes them unsuitable for large, mass-produced structures, such as windows or screens, that may benefit from their characteristics.

Therefore, the exploration of super-hard transparent materials—such as Star Trek: The famous transparent aluminum in the Voyage House—has been going on for many years and may eventually come to an end.

Scientists and colleagues at Jilin University in China have come up with a way to produce diamond-like glass using a unique form of carbon. Their findings were published in the journal Nature.

The creation of new amorphous materials-materials lacking long-range crystalline structures-has great potential for materials science. But it is almost impossible to make a diamond from the diamond itself, because it has a melting point of more than 4,000 degrees Celsius (more than 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit). As far as humans are concerned, in most cases, once you are a diamond, you have always been a diamond.

Nevertheless, there is hardly anything better than carbon in nature in terms of forming a stable structure. Depending on the type of bond it has, carbon can take the shape of the malleable graphite in a pencil, which is soft enough for writing, or very strong enough to balance an elephant on the pencil without being pierced.

With the advent of diamonds as a raw material, scientists turned to other forms of carbon and landed on the bucky ball. Buckyball is the general name of Buckminster fullerene and is the most common form of natural fullerene. They contain 60 carbon molecules arranged in the shape of a football.

In order to make the kind of material they are looking for, researchers need to persuade buckyballs to lose their spherical shape, which requires a lot of coaxing. Under sufficient pressure, fullerenes will collapse, so the scientists put the ball into a multi-anvil press, the pressure is close to the collapse boundary, the temperature is about 1,000 degrees Celsius, to simulate the process that occurs in the depths of the earth.

This causes the structure to lose shape and become amorphous before being precipitated as a diamond-like structure. Similar structures have been fabricated before, but this new process allows scientists to create samples thousands of times larger than previously produced samples. Although their size is still only a few millimeters, they are large enough to be characterized by scanning electron microscopy.

The temperature required to convert fullerenes into amorphous diamond-like glass is relatively low, which opens the door to larger manufacturing and practical applications. In addition, changing the temperature seems to affect at least certain properties of the glass. The team created several small samples in different colors. Many of them are pale yellow, some are brown, and others are almost colorless.

Unlike diamonds, the internal structure of the sample is only intermediate, which means that the atoms will not be arranged long distances along the plane. Therefore, they contain the highest hardness, elasticity and thermal conductivity of any known amorphous material.

The specific uses of these new materials in the real world will require the construction of larger parts. However, its thermal and optical properties have the potential to be used in many scientific fields and in our daily lives.

As we replace equipment and upgrade our houses to diamond-like materials, cell phone and window replacement cases may be dying.

We don't know you, but we already feel more beautiful.

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