The graphite found in your favorite pencil could have instead been the diamond your mother always wears. What made the difference? Researchers are finding out. How molten carbon crystallizes into ...

Watching Diamond Formation in Real Time Earlier work using mass spectrometry indicated that single-electron ionization could help break C-H bonds, but that method could only infer structures in the ...

Diamonds form deep within the Earth's mantle, around 250 kilometers below the surface, where immense pressure (up to 10 GPa) and temperatures (around 2,200 °C) compress carbon into diamonds over ...

Molten carbon can crystallize into diamond or graphite, but it has been difficult to study this process. New simulations show that graphite can sometimes "hijack" the pathway that would lead to ...