Structural Stability of Clean, Passivated, and Partially Dehydrogenated Cuboid and Octahedral Nanodiamonds Up to 2 Nanometers in Size
The use of precisely applied mechanical forces to induce site-specific chemical transformations is called positional mechanosynthesis, and diamond is an important early target for achieving mechanosynthesis experimentally. The next major experimental milestone may be the mechanosynthetic
fabrication of atomically precise 3D structures, creating readily accessible diamond-based nanomechanical components engineered to form desired architectures possessing superlative mechanical strength, stiffness, and strength-to-weight ratio. To help motivate this future experimental work,
the present paper addresses the basic stability of the simplest nanoscale diamond structures—cubes and octahedra—possessing clean, hydrogenated, or partially hydrogenated surfaces. Computational studies using Density Functional Theory (DFT) with the Car-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics
(CPMD) code, consuming ∼1,466,852.53 CPU-hours of runtime on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer (23 TFlops), confirmed that fully hydrogenated nanodiamonds up to 2 nm (∼900–1800 atoms) in size having only C(111) faces (octahedrons) or only C(110) and C(100) faces (cuboids) maintain
stable sp3 hybridization. Fully dehydrogenated cuboid nanodiamonds above 1 nm retain the diamond lattice pattern, but smaller dehydrogenated cuboids and dehydrogenated octahedron nanodiamonds up to 2 nm reconstruct to bucky-diamond or onion-like carbon (OLC). At least three adjacent
passivating H atoms may be removed, even from the most graphitization-prone C(111) face, without reconstruction of the underlying diamond lattice.
Keywords: BUCKY-DIAMOND; CARBON; CUBOID; DEHYDROGENATION; DFT; DIAMOND; DIMERIZATION; DMS; FULLERENE; HYDROGEN; MECHANOSYNTHESIS; NANODIAMOND; NANOTECHNOLOGY; OCTAHEDRON; OLC; RECONSTRUCTION; STABILITY
Document Type: Review Article
Publication date: 01 February 2011
- Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience is an international peer-reviewed journal with a wide-ranging coverage, consolidates research activities in all aspects of computational and theoretical nanoscience into a single reference source. This journal offers scientists and engineers peer-reviewed research papers in all aspects of computational and theoretical nanoscience and nanotechnology in chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering and biology to publish original full papers and timely state-of-the-art reviews and short communications encompassing the fundamental and applied research.
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