Anisotropic elasticity and abnormal Poisson’s ratios in super-hard materials

We theoretically investigated the variable mechanical properties such as Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratios and compressibility in super-hard materials. Our tensorial analysis reveals that the mechanical properties of super-hard materials are strongly sensitive to the anisotropy index of materials. In sharp contrast to the traditional positive constant as thought before, the Poisson’s ratio of super-hard materials could be unexpectedly negative, zero, or even positive with a value much larger than the isotropic upper limit of 0.5 along definite directions. Our results uncover a correlation between compressibility and hardness, which offer insights on the prediction of new super-hard materials.