Scientists from China and the United States believe they have discovered a new carbon material that is tough enough to crack diamond.

Yanming Ma of Jilin University in Changchun, China, and his colleagues believe that the new carbon material they theoretically model in the current volume of Physical Review Letters may already have been created in a 2003 laboratory experiment.

Working with a team of scientists in 2003, a co-author on the current work, Ho-kwang Mao of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., found that when he squeezed graphite in a diamond-toothed press, it formed a new material hard enough to crack the teeth of the press. But the original study, published in the journal Science (Mao, et al. 2003), did not theoretically explore the molecular make-up of the new carbon, which Ma and his team have named M-carbon.

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