Achievement

An interdisciplinary project between the groups of Professors Ric Kaner and Sarah Tolbert focuses on the search for new ultra-incompressible, superhard materials. Former MCTP Fellows Robert Cumberland and Jonathan Levine synthesized both hard and superhard compounds by combining late transition metals, such as osmium and rhenium, with boron to create covalently bonded networks. The compressibilities of these materials were then studied in collaboration with Michelle Weinberger (Tolbert group). The materials were subjected to extremely high pressures and high energy synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National labs. This research led to the discovery of two of the most incompressible materials known, OsB2 and ReB2, as reported in papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Science. Recent work on highly incompressible and hard solid solutions of OsB2 and RuB2 are now in press in the journal Chemistry of Materials.