This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have created a carbon material with a three-dimensional structure. The material, named diamondiyne, can be described as a porous diamond with the same basic shape as a tetrahedron.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of new porous materials made from carbon-based molecules and metal ions, known as MOFs. At the University of Gothenburg, Professor Karl Börjesson's research team has long been interested in creating porous materials without metal ions, in which carbon-based molecules without metals bind together to form what are known as COFs. The study, now published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, is a collaboration between Börjesson's research group and colleagues at Stockholm University and Chalmers University of Technology.
It was during this work that they succeeded in bonding carbon atoms to one another through triple bonds, creating the carbon allotrope diamondiyne for the first time. "It has taken us an incredibly long time, but we finally succeeded. I am very pleased," says Börjesson, professor of physical chemistry at the University of Gothenburg.
A colleague told Börjesson about a website where theoretical chemists have listed the carbon allotropes that should be possible to create—an almost infinitely long list. An allotrope is a chemical substance consisting of only one type of atom. Diamonds and graphite are examples of allotropes of carbon.
Diamondiyne is a tetrahedral carbon allotrope that was first described theoretically 35 years ago. Diamondiyne is created using relatively inexpensive equipment, with the material forming as a thin film where two liquids meet. Diamondiyne crystallizes with the carbon atoms arranged as tetrahedra connected corner to corner in all three dimensions.
"The structure creates voids between the tetrahedra. The carbon allotrope can therefore be compared to a porous diamond. But unlike diamonds, diamondiyne does not require high pressure to make the carbon atoms bond to one another," says Börjesson.
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