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What would happen first with diamond?

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pnacze199204:
I've found an interesting question on the Internet, that haven't been answered yet, so let me cite it here:

"It is frequently stated that although graphite is the more stable allotrope of carbon at STP, the activation energy of the diamond-to-graphite transformation is so high that our diamonds will never spontaneously turn into black dust.

Some sources add (correctly) that nothing is ever never, and reactions merely slow down with lower temperature, they never stop entirely. (The Arrhenius equation comes here). But nobody ever quantifies the non-neverness of the death of a diamond. So my question is:

Under normal conditions at room temperature, which of the following will happen first; when, and how fast?

1. Diamond transforming to graphite.
2. Diamond evaporating. Marshall and Norton ,J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1950, 72 (5), pp 2166–2171, seem to say that latent heat of carbon is 170kcal/mole, but I haven't got access to the whole paper to see what they say about the rate of evaporation.
3. Diamond spontaneously combusting to CO2.
4. Carbon decaying to iron via tunnelling. Barrow and Tipler, in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, 1986), p.654, quote 10^1500 years for this".

billnotgatez:
Is this a continuation of your past posting
https://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=95325.0

Enthalpy:
4. is definitely slower than all others. The barrier is like 1MeV.

You can evaluate 2. because you can extrapolate the vapour pressure down to room temperature, and the vapour pressure gives you the evaporation rate (At least in theory. Sometimes my attempts failed, I don't know why).

As experimental verification won't happen, a wrong result is about as good as a correct one.

Enthalpy:
I feel reasonable to say that room-temperature combustion is faster than room-temperature evaporation, because any evaporated carbon (whether C2, C3 or whatever one prefers) would react quickly with the surrounding oxygen.

My intuition, and nothing more, tells that oxidation at room temperature depends fundamentally on trace impurities in air: ozone, nitrogen oxides. These, not molecular oxygen, are able to react without heating. It's observed at tyres for instance. So the oxidation rate would not be a constant for "air" but would be a consequence of pollution.

I also suspect that the four listed causes are so slow that other ones are faster. For instance cosmic rays (and their daughter particles) arrive at Earth's surface at a rate like 1/s/m2. Many of them have enough energy to rip a carbon atom from the crystal. This may well happen more often than 26meV thermal energy concentrating by chance to 7.4eV to evaporate an atom.

Following a personal message by pnacze199204:

Here's a paper dealing with the relationship between vapour pressure and evaporation rate
http://www.nano.lu.se/data/nanometer/users/ftf-jjo/file_element/846f307d82d0db1bdcf8f3d5379611fd/lecture2.pdf
with some formulas. As I said already, these formulas are inaccurate, I got wrong predictions from them. But for your estimates they may suffice.

The theory behind them (I guess only an end number is important to you) is that

* Pressure results from a number of gas molecules impinging per time and area unit, and from their momentum.
* At equilibrium, the solid sublimes as much vapour at it receives. Definition of vapour pressure.
* Now without an external partial pressure, we could deduce at which rate vapour sublimes from the solid (or the liquid).Looks convincing, perhaps even unavoidable? But it fails. Proofs are for maths. Physics is an experimental science, where we make models. Sometimes they succeed, here they fail.

Enthalpy:
For diamond these questions are of purely theoretical interest. But if some day we have secondary kilogram standards made of silicon (the primary resulting now from Planck's constant), they may become important.

Copies of the kg drifted by few 10-8 in a century, which would mean a complete change in 10 billion years. I trust Pt and Ir better than C and Si for that task.

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