ICY they may be, but diamonds can no longer be thought of as chemically
frigid. For the first time, chemists in the US have persuaded diamond to take
part in a standard chemical reaction. Stacey Bent and George Wang at Stanford
University in California got diamond to react at room temperature by putting it
in a vacuum with butadiene (Journal of the American Chemical Society,
vol 122, p 744).
Together they formed cyclohexene, a hexagonal molecule hinged into the
diamond surface by one of its six carbon-carbon bonds. “It’s exciting in the
sense that this was a classic organic…
