In 1994 the Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted an American Carbon Society Workshop entitled Carbon Materials for Advanced Technologies . The inspiration for this book came from that workshop. By late 1995 a suitable group of contributors had been identified such that the scope of this book would be sufficiently broad to make a useful contribution to the literature.
Carbon is a truly remarkable element which can exist as one of several allotropes.
It is found abundantly in nature as coal or as natural graphite, and much less abundantly as diamond. Moreover, it is readily obtained from the pyrolysis of hydrocarbons such as resins and pitches, and can be deposited from the vapor phase by cracking hydrocarbon rich gases. In its various allotropic forms carbon has quite remarkable properties. Diamond possesses the highest thermal conductivity known to man and is prized as a gem stone. Both of these attributes result from the high degree of crystal perfection and bond strength in the diamond lattice.