While nanocrystalline diamond is quickly becoming one of the most widely studied nanomaterials, achieving a large fraction of diamond nanoparticles in a polymer coating has been an unresolved problem. In this work, polymer nano- and microfibers containing high loadings of 5 nm diamond particles (up to 80 wt % in polyacrylonitrile and 40% in polyamide 11) have been demonstrated using electrospun...

A nitrogen-vacancy (NV(-)) centre in a nanodiamond, levitated in high vacuum, has recently been proposed as a probe for demonstrating mesoscopic centre-of-mass superpositions and for testing quantum gravity. Here, we study the behaviour of optically levitated nanodiamonds containing NV(-) centres at sub-atmospheric pressures and show that while they burn in air, this can be prevented by replaci...

Materials combining the hardness and strength of diamond with the higher thermal stability of cubic boron nitride (cBN) have broad potential value in science and engineering. Reacting nanodiamond with cBN at moderate pressures and high temperatures provides a pathway to such materials. Here we report the fabrication of Cx-BN nanocomposites, measuring up to 10 mm in longest dimension, by reactin...

Direct numerical simulations are performed of turbulent planar Couette flow which are seeded with two-way coupled particles at low volume concentration. Based on an understanding of the development of particle stress (horizontal momentum carried vertically on average by the particle phase) in monodisperse systems at various particle Stokes numbers, several bidisperse and continuously polydisper...

This study reports the interactions of modified nanodiamond particles in vitro with human blood. Modifications performed on the nanodiamond particles include oxygenation with a chemical method and hydrogenation upon chemical vapor deposition (CVD) plasma treatment. Such nanodiamonds were later incubated in whole human blood for different time intervals, ranging from 5 min to 5 h. The morphology...

We give evidence of nanometric size (5–15 nm) crystalline diamonds in carbon thin films obtained at low substrate temperature (15 8C) under the action of low pressure (0.1–0.3 Torr) 35 kHz excited CH4/Ar (80–95%) plasmas. The decrease in Ar concentration was found to lead to higher film hardness while crystalline nanodiamonds are observed in a wide interval (1–3.5 h) of deposition times but onl...

A prototype cross-dispersed optical echelle spectrograph of very high resolution has been designed and built at Steward Observatory and tested at the Starfire Optical Range (SOR) 1.5 m telescope. It is the first spectrograph to take advantage of diffractionlimited images provided by adaptive optics in order to achieve a potential resolving power of R ∼ 600, 000. The wavelength coverage in a sin...

The effective dispersion of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in a thermoset was achieved using ionic liquid as the dispersion-curing agent. We preferentially dispersed multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) down to individual tube levels in epoxy resin. Here the dispersion is ruled by the depletion of physical bundles within the MWCNT networks, for which molecular ordering of ionic liquids is considered ...

A direct polycondensation reaction, which is carried out by using phosphorylating agents such as triphenylphosphine as an initiator, was applied to the in-situ formation of various condensation polymers including high temperature polymers within various matrix polymers so that those rigid rod-like polymers were well dispersed within the matrix polymers. Improvements in tensile strength and modu...