What is it about?
Contrary to the common sense that diamond is hard and graphite is soft, the state of the art first-principles theoretical calculation shows that graphite is ’stiffer’ than diamond in terms of phonon excitation (= lattice vibration) at elevated temperatures.
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Why is it important?
Diamond is the hardest natural material whereas graphite is a soft, classical graphing material. Graphite is also known as the mother material of the recently topical single-atomic layered graphene. Cubic and hexagonal boron nitride polymorphs (cBN and hBN) show a marked resemblance to carbon allotropes. Theoretical knowledge of lattice vibration (its quanta is called as phonon) at finite temperature is important for materials’ stability and thermo-dynamical process developments.
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This page is a summary of: Debye temperature and stiffness of carbon and boron nitride polymorphs from first principles calculations, Physical Review B, February 2006, American Physical Society (APS),
DOI: 10.1103/physrevb.73.064304.
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