(Invited) Novel Structured Carbon Materials Under High Pressure

Abstract

Design and synthesis of new carbon materials have been attracting intensive attention due to their application in various fields. The study of carbon nano materials under high pressure provides us a very effective method to the creation of new carbon materials, especially superhard material which is hardly discovered at ambient condition because of the appearance of nanometer scale size effect and the novel high pressure behavior. Deeply understanding those unusual high pressure structures and physical phenomena also unveils new aspects of the intrinsic physics of nanomaterials. Fullerene, for example C60 is an important member and a representative zero-dimensional nano material in carbon family which has twice as much bulk modulus as diamond. It provides us an ideal carbon source to study novel phase and design new carbon materials induced by high pressure. In this presentation, several examples on high pressure induced novel structural phase transition in recently studied typical nano-confined fullerene will be outlined, including unique long range ordered crystal with amorphous nano clusters as building blocks (OACC) in solvated C60 and C70 crystals which brings new physical insight to understand order and disorder concept and new approach to design superhard carbon materials, a new carbon allotrope with a fully sp 3 bonded monoclinic structure (termed V carbon) from compressed C70 inside of single wall nanotubes (C70 peapod). These findings present a new strategy for constructing new carbon material with application of high pressure and nano-carbon material as building blocks.