What is the hardest known material?

Answer 1

The simple answer is.... a solid. Molecules of a solid are already packed very close together, with little room to move around, which is why a solid is, for lack of a better word, solid. The molecules of a liquid, however, have enough space between them to flow around each other, giving them a little room to compress. A gas is by far the easiest to compress. Gas molecules have so much space between them that they are constantly bouncing off each other, sometimes at very high speeds. More space between the molecules of a substance means compression is that much easier.

Answer 2

The hardest substance known is Lonsdaleite. The reason it is so strong is because it has a hexagonal unit cell, related to the diamond unit cell in the same way that the hexagonal and cubic close packed crystal systems are related. The 'diamond' structure can be considered to be made up of interlocking rings of six carbon atoms, in the chair conformation. In lonsdaleite, some of the rings are in the boat conformation instead.

Lonsdaleite is simulated to be 58% harder than diamond and to resist indentation pressures of 152 GPa, whereas diamond would break at 97 GPa. Lonsdaleite is found in nature inside of meteorites that were made of graphite became superheated as it entered the Earth's atmosphere and then slammed into the ground with a great enough pressure to force the atoms into a hexagonal structure.

I thought it was carbon nanotubes or carbon nanorods.

Answer 3

The hardest solid known is the ADN, or aggregated diamond nanorod, which is a nanocrystalline form of diamond.

Answer 4

The hardest metal is the rare earth element Lutetium.The hardest solid is titanium.

Answer 5

both wurtzite boron nitride and mineral lonsdaleite at 58% harder than a diamond. made by Nanotechnology to rearrange a diamond