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Communication

Genesis on Diamonds

Andrei P. Sommer*^†, Dan Zhu^† and Hans-Joerg Fecht^†^‡

Institute of Micro and Nanomaterials, University of Ulm, 89081 Ulm, Germany, and Institute for Nanotechnology, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany

Cryst. Growth Des., 2008, 8 (8), pp 2628–2629

DOI: 10.1021/cg8005037

Publication Date (Web): July 10, 2008

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: andrei.sommer@uni-ulm.de.

†

University of Ulm.

‡

Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.

Abstract

The scientific community paid little attention to a visionary paper, in which Szent-Gyrgyi predicted that crystalline interfacial water layers would play a fundamental role in biology and evolution. It was 1971, and the proof of the existence of crystalline interfacial water layers at room temperature was virtually lacking in the literature. Recently, we provided experimental evidence for their existence on hydrogenated nanocrystalline diamond at room temperature. Crystallinity resulted from a decrease in conductance in response to an increase in humidity, associated with a decrease in the order of the interfacial water molecules implicated in proton conductivity. The correlation between conductance and humidity is not exclusive to synthetic diamond: It prevails on hydrogenated natural diamonds. Hydrogenation in nature is plausible: Volcanoes emit various hot gases including hydrogen. The capacity of interfacial water layers to impose order was exposed in the process of formation of supercubane carbon nanocrystals. It is important that the order imposed to molecules landing on hydrogenated diamond is more durable and superior to that realizable on any other origin of life platform, for instance, graphite. Hydrogenated diamond advances to the best of all possible origin of life platforms.