Nanodiamonds made from tiny graphene triangles

RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

01 July 2026

Nanodiamonds can host atom-sized light emitters for quantum sensing and imaging, but making nanodiamonds that are small, crystalline and uniform has been difficult. A single-step process for making nanodiamonds only 3–4 nanometres in size uses planar carbon ‘nanographene’ molecules with hydrogen atoms on the edges, and can be adapted to generate fluorescent nanodiamonds.

This is a summary of: Liang, J. et al. Bottom-up synthesis of molecular nanodiamond from nanographene. Nature 655, 102–108 (2026).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02001-w

‘Expert opinion’ and the figure are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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