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Osmium turns out to be harder than diamond:
H Cynn and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have established that the metal osmium has a higher hardness than diamond. The team placed a 60-mkm-across osmium sample in a diamond anvil cell and compressed it to 60 GPa. The bulk modulus of osmium as calculated from lattice spacing changes measured by x-ray diffraction was found to be K=462 GPa - to be compared with 443 GPA in diamond. This discovery came as a great surprise because osmium differs considerably from other large-K materials in its crystal structure. Osmium is a relatively heavy metal with a hexagonal structure, whereas diamond, for example, is a light material whose atoms are covalently bonded into a cubic structure.
Reference:
http://prl.aps.org
H Cynn and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have established that the metal osmium has a higher hardness than diamond. The team placed a 60-mkm-across osmium sample in a diamond anvil cell and compressed it to 60 GPa. The bulk modulus of osmium as calculated from lattice spacing changes measured by x-ray diffraction was found to be K=462 GPa - to be compared with 443 GPA in diamond. This discovery came as a great surprise because osmium differs considerably from other large-K materials in its crystal structure. Osmium is a relatively heavy metal with a hexagonal structure, whereas diamond, for example, is a light material whose atoms are covalently bonded into a cubic structure.
Reference:
http://prl.aps.org