At the macro scale, diamond is usually considered to show no deformation behavior at all  The consequences of any extreme attempt to deform it often occur brittle fracture before the visible deformation is reached  This limits its application in some applications that may be subjected to mechanical deformation  In order to carry out the nano-scale mechanical test, the research team designed a set of unique nano-mechanics experimental method, and carried out quantitative compression-bending tests on single crystal and polycrystalline diamond nano-needle samples  the test samples can achieve a large deformation more than tens of times higher than that of macroscopic diamond, and can be completely recovered in a very large range  The experimental results are simulated and analyzed  It is confirmed that the elastic deformation of the single crystal diamond nano-needle on the stretching side is about 9%, and the corresponding strength is also close to its theoretical limit
This discovery will help to further expand the application of diamond in biomedical fields such as drug delivery, biological detection and imaging
At present, the application of diamond in biomedical fields such as biological detection and imaging is limited