Researchers have been speculating about making a 2D sheet of diamond that they call Diamane for a long time. Now researchers from Rice University in collaboration with Russian researchers (from the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials in Moscow) published a roadmap for the creation of this material.
The researchers calculated a phase diagram that lays the conditions (such as temperature and pressure) that are necessary to turn stacked graphene sheets into a diamond lattice. They say that diamane could be made completely chemically with no pressure at all.
Diamane potentially has a wide range of applications in the energy storage industry, nano-optics and electronics.
Currently diamond films are made via CVD, but these have poor quality (because they are poly-crystalline). These are useful for mechanical purposes, but not fo electronics.