Full elastic tensor of a crystal of the superhard compound ReB2

The search for superhard materials, driven by their widespread use in industrial applications, highlights one of the most difficult problems in the field of materials science: the accurate characterization of a material’s intrinsic physical properties. This paper reports on the full elastic tensor of two polycrystalline isotropic specimens and one specimen of ReB2 consisting of highly oriented grains. The high-monocrystal bulk modulus value extracted from the grain-oriented specimen, measured by resonant ultrasound spectroscopy, validates the ultra-incompressibility of ReB2. An observed hardness of 40 GPa and a Debye temperature of 731 K were calculated for the ReB2 crystal, confirming its superhard and super-stiff properties. All the measured moduli of the ReB2 grain-oriented crystal exceed the comparable ones for the polycrystal by amounts that cannot be explained by averaging over direction, which may reveal why recent measurements reported on ReB2 containing excess boron yield values that are not as hard or incompressible as the crystal.