Confirming theoretical predictions and potentially opening the door to novel, ultrahard optical materials, a collaboration of scientists in Italy and France has produced “amorphous carbonia,” a glassy form of CO2 that is structurally homologous to the group IV dioxide glasses SiO2 and GeO2. A report of the team’s work appears in the June 15 issue of Nature.Using an externally heated diamond anvil cell, the investigators subjected molecular solid CO2 to pressures of 40 to 76 GPa and to temperatures of 300 to 680 K. Infrared and Raman spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction measurements suggest that the carbon-oxygen double bonds break under such conditions and that an extended network of carbon-oxygen single bonds dominates.The team included researchers from the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy and from Università di Firenze, both in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy; from CRS-SOFT of the Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia (INFM-CNR) and from Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” both in Rome; from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the INFM/Democritos National Simulation Center, both in Trieste, Italy; and from the European Synchrotron Research Facility in Grenoble, France.