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Assistant Professor Hao Yan has been awarded a prestigious New Directions grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund to support his research group’s efforts to create “tiny diamonds”.

 

Diamonds are more than just shiny jewelry. Molecule-sized diamond clusters, known as diamondoids, are fascinating materials with applications in drugs, chemical synthesis, and electronics. The caveat, however, is that they are currently only accessible in petroleum oils at parts-per-million (ppm) level concentrations. Dr. Yan and his students, teaming up with collaborators from the University of Florida, will tackle this challenge by synthesizing diamondoids under high-pressure-high-temperature conditions similar to those used by industry to make artificial macroscopic diamonds. This work will not only greatly enhance the technical applicability of diamondoids:  it will also shed light on the mechanisms of diamondoid formation in nature and potentially provide insights into the cycling pathways of carbon in the interior of the Earth.