White sapphire
From apm
Advantages:
- very hard material, very high heat conductivity
- made out of the extremely common element aluminum (more common than carbon)
- thermodynamically stable not just metastable thus very heat resistant
Disadvantage:
Crystal structure of less high symmetry than other interesting base materials.
Maybe look at metastable polymorphs at the eventual cost of somewhat less heat resistance?
Note: The page uses leukosapphire instead of just sapphire because
just sapphire is often associated with a blue to black variant where the colour is caused by metal impurities.
A base material for gemstone metamaterial technology would be perfectly impurity free and colorless clear though.
Like a leukosapphire just better.
Related
- Corundum structure
- Aluminum oxides
- Tistarite Ti2O3 has the same structure.
- Moissanite is also an extremely heat resistant base material.
- Diamond is much less heat and oxidation resistant.
- Both diamond and moissanite have higher crystal structure symmetry than leukosapphire
