CH 221 Chemical of the Week
Principle Properties of Diamond
Choose virtually any characteristic of a material - electronic, structural, or optical - and the value associated with diamond will almost always be the most extreme: Diamond is invariably 'the biggest and the best'. The following is a table of the properties of diamond that render it so potentially useful across many fields of science (Ref. 'Synthetic Diamond - Emerging CVD Science and Technology', Spear and Dismukes, Wiley, NY, 1994).
| Property | Value | Units |
|---|---|---|
| Hardness | 10,000 | kg/mm2 |
| Strength, tensile | >1.2 | GPa |
| Strength, compressive | >110 | GPa |
| Sound velocity | 18,000 | m/s |
| Density | 3.52 | g/cm3 |
| Young's modulus | 1.22 | GPa |
| Poisson's ratio | 0.2 | Dimensionless |
| Thermal expansion coefficient | 0.0000011 | /K |
| Thermal conductivity | 20.0 | W/cm-K |
| Thermal shock parameter | 30,000,000 | W/m |
| Debye temperature | 2,200 | K |
| Optical index of refraction (at 591 nm) | 2.41 | Dimensionless |
| Optical transmissivity (from nm to far IR) | 225 | Dimensionless |
| Loss tangent at 40 Hz | 0.0006 | Dimensionless |
| Dielectric constant | 5.7 | Dimensionless |
| Dielectric strength | 10,000,000 | V/cm |
| Electron mobility | 2,200 | cm2/V-s |
| Hole mobility | 1,600 | cm2/V-s |
| Electron saturated velocity | 27,000,000 | cm/s |
| Hole saturated velocity | 10,000,000 | cm/s |
| Work function | small and negative | On [111] surface |
| Bandgap | 5.45 | eV |
| Resistivity | 1013 - 1016 | Ohm-cm |
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