北京高压科学研究中心
Center for High Pressure Science &Technology Advanced Research

8.5 YANG Liuxiang

Unraveling the lonsdaleite enigma

Liuxiang Yang

HPSTAR, Staff Scientist (2017-now)

Email: liuxiang.yang@hpstar.ac.cn


IMG_20180201_125616

Lonsdaleite as the sp3 formation carbon allotrope has been discovered more than fifty years. Until now the definitive conclusion about the structure details of it still be lacking due to the missing of pure sample. Here we report a way to synthesize a good quality lonsdaleite crystal in laser heating diamond anvil cell. The crystal structure of recovered lonsdaleite has been fully studied by X-ray diffraction, HRTEM, UV Raman and DFT calculation respectively, which presents a highly distorted C-C tetrahedron with two different bond lengths (1.47 and 1.56 Å). This unique feature of lonsdaleite indicates the diversity of sp3 bonds and the possibility to form some new sp3 carbon allotropes.