Diamonds have a reputation as one of the hardest materials known to man, which is undoubtedly true, but they're not as tough as you think they are.

Vickers test anvil. R Tanaka, CC BY. Hardness is an important property of materials and often determines what they can be used for, but it is also quite difficult to define.

But using a standard hardness test, which indents the material with a small pyramid and measures the force required, researchers recently observed that the w-BN in fact easily exceeded diamond’s ...

This test also uses a diamond indenter with a pyramid shape. ... (See table, Shore hardness testing) Each scale ranges from 100 (a lack of indentation) to 0 ...

Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but they’re also prized by oil drillers, road crews and experimental physicists for their unparalleled ability to bore, grind and cut.

Diamonds are prized for their hardness. In jewelry, they can last generations and resist scratches during day-to-day wear. As blades or drill bits, they can penetrate almost anything without ...

He and his colleagues determined that those samples had a measured hardness of up to 108 gigapascals—slightly harder than synthetic diamond but less hard than polycrystalline diamonds made of ...

The new material proved to have a hardness of 113 GPa on a Vickers hardness test. For context, mild steel has a Vickers hardness of around 9 GPa, while naturally occurring diamonds rate at around ...

Superhard materials are valued, but not always easy to find. That's why scientists tasked A.I. with creating them. Now they just have to test them.

A material’s hardness relates to its mechanical resistance when subjected to mechanical indentation by another harder body. Diamond is considered the hardest natural material and is typically used for ...

While the researchers weren't able to scratch the diamonds to test hardness directly, by measuring the diamonds' stiffness, they can make inferences about their hardness.