Ultrasound elasticity of diamond at gigapascal pressures

Abstract

Diamond is the hardest known material in nature and features a wide spectrum of industrial and scientific applications. The key to diamond's outstanding properties is its elasticity, which is associated with its exceptional hardness, shear strength, and incompressibility. Despite many theoretical works, direct measurements of elastic properties are limited to only ∼1.4 kilobar (kb) pressure. Here, we report ultrasonic interferometry measurements of elasticity of void-free diamond powder in a multianvil press from 1 atmosphere up to 12.1 gigapascal (GPa). We obtained high-accuracy bulk modulus of diamond as K0 = 439.2(9) GPa, K0′ = 3.6(1), and shear modulus as G0 = 533(3) GPa, G0′ = 2.3(3), which are consistent with our first-principles simulation. In contrast to the previous experiment of isothermal equation of state, the K0′ obtained in this work is evidently greater, indicating that the diamond is not fully described by the “n-m” Mie–Grüneisen model. The structural and elastic properties measured in this work may provide a robust primary pressure scale in extensive pressure ranges.