Researchers at Rice University in Houston, in association with Russian collaborators, believe they can create perfect sheets of diamond a few atoms thick – something which is called diamane – from stacked sheets of graphene. They add the transformation could be done chemically and without the need for high pressure.

"Diamanes have a wide potential range of application," said Pavel Sorokin, senior researcher at the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials in Moscow. "They can be applied as very thin, dielectric hard films in nanocapacitors or mechanically stiff, nanothick elements in nanoelectronics. They also have potential for application in nano optics."

Diamond films are routinely made via chemical vapour deposition, "but they're always very poor quality because they're polycrystalline," said Rice University theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson. "For mechanical purposes, like very expensive sandpaper, they're perfect. But for electronics, you would need high quality for it to serve as a wide band gap semiconductor."