Scientists in Beijing have produced the first sizable sample of meteorite diamond, a rare form of carbon also known as lonsdaleite or hexagonal diamond. The material is thought to be tougher than the conventional diamonds found on Earth.
The breakthrough, reported July 30 in the journal Nature, was achieved by recreating the crushing heat and pressure of a meteorite strike in the laboratory.
Researchers formed thin disks of the unusual crystal, a step they hope will pave the way for industrial applications in drilling, electronics, and even quantum technologies.
How a cubic diamond gets its strength
Diamonds are considered the hardest natural substance, their strength rooted in a repeating molecular pattern. Each carbon atom bonds with four others at angles of 109.5 degrees, forming an endless lattice of tetrahedra.
Scientists create meteorite ‘alien’ diamond harder than anything on Earth 💎 –
– Researchers in China have successfully created hexagonal diamonds, also called lonsdaleites, a form of diamond that is believed to be even tougher than the cubic diamonds found naturally on Earth.… pic.twitter.com/vayowPPZOo
— CaratX™ (@RealCaratX) August 12, 2025
From the side, the structure appears as three repeating layers of carbon atoms—known as A, B, and C—giving the stone its face-centered cubic structure.
A theory dating back to the 1960s
In the 1960s, scientists proposed that a slightly different form of diamond might exist. Small, impure crystals with this arrangement were later discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which struck the Arizona desert about 50,000 years ago.
Unlike a cubic diamond, the meteorite version contains two bond lengths—one shorter, one longer—and only two repeating carbon layers, labeled A and B. That shift creates a hexagonal pattern, which models suggest could make the mineral up to 58 percent harder than ordinary diamond.
Long-standing doubts and challenges
Skepticism persisted for decades, however, because the meteorite samples were too small and contaminated with graphite, cubic diamond, and other forms of carbon. Producing pure crystals large enough to study became a challenge in itself.
Recreating a meteorite strike in the lab
To solve it, Wenge Yang and colleagues at the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research used a diamond anvil cell, which presses a sample between two diamond tips.
🚨 Scientists created the First sizable Meteorite diamond — also called lonsdaleite, a hexagonal material predicted to be 58% harder than Earth’s diamonds. pic.twitter.com/uJjEDDWVnU
— SciTech Era (@SciTechera) August 17, 2025
Starting with purified graphite, they slowly compressed the material to pressures of about 20 gigapascals—200,000 times that of the Earth’s atmosphere—then applied laser heat above 1,400 degrees Celsius (2,552 Fahrenheit).
The treatment forced flat carbon sheets to shift and bond into a buckled honeycomb, locking atoms into the hexagonal arrangement.
Evidence of a hexagonal structure
Electron microscopy revealed the expected AB layering, while X-ray crystallography confirmed the hexagonal structure. Though the crystal still contained some impurities, it provided the clearest evidence yet that hexagonal diamond can be synthesized.
“It’s a good first demonstration,” said Soumen Mandal, a physicist at Cardiff University in the U.K., not involved in the study. He noted that producing larger, purer crystals will be critical to test properties such as strength, thermal conductivity, and electrical behavior.
Future applications may be a decade away
Yang’s team confirmed that the new material is at least as hard as standard diamond, though full hardness testing requires bigger samples. The researchers hope that within the next decade, high-quality hexagonal diamond could be produced in sufficient quantities for real-world use.
“Our goal is to produce larger, high-quality hexagonal diamond samples suitable for real-world applications,” Yang said. “These efforts will help tailor hexagonal diamond’s properties for specific applications and pave the way for its industrial adoption.”
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