Mass Produced Perfect Diamonds

[CaptainChewbacca]

Link

Diamonds are a girl's best friend, they say - and soon they could be every girl's best friend.

A team in the US has brought the world one step closer to cheap, mass-produced, perfect diamonds. The improvement also means there is no theoretical limit on the size of diamonds that can be grown in the lab.

A team led by Russell Hemley, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, makes diamonds by chemical vapour deposition (CVD), where carbon atoms in a gas are deposited on a surface to produce diamond crystals.

The CVD process produces rapid diamond growth, but impurities from the gas are absorbed and the diamonds take on a brownish tint.

These defects can be purged by a costly high-pressure, high-temperature treatment called annealing. However, only relatively small diamonds can be produced this way: the largest so far being a 34-carat yellow diamond about 1 centimetre wide.

Microwaved Gems

Now Hemley and his team have got around the size limit by using microwaves to "cook" their diamonds in a hydrogen plasma at 2200 °C but at low pressure. Diamond size is now limited only by the size of the microwave chamber used.

"The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow us to push to kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality," says Hemley's Carnegie Institute colleague Ho-kwang Mao.

"The microwave unit is also significantly less expensive than a large high-pressure apparatus," adds Yufei Meng, who also participated in the experiments.

The new technique is so efficient that the synthetic diamonds contain fewer impurities than those found in nature, says Meng. "We once sent one of our lab-grown diamonds for jewellery identification, it wasn't told apart from natural ones," she says.

One immediate application will be to make ultra-high quality windows that are optically transparent to lasers.

Threat to Commerce

The team's method "could be routinely run in any laboratory where it is needed," says Alexandre Zaitsev, a physicist at the City University of New York, whose work also includes diamonds. "When considered in combination with the high-growth-rate technique of CVD diamonds, it seems to be a starting point of mass-scale production of perfect diamond material at a low price."

Zaitsev considers low-pressure annealing at temperatures greater than 2000 °C to be a "breakthrough in diamond research and technology".

The improving quality of synthetic diamonds threatens the natural diamond market. While 20 tonnes of natural diamonds are mined annually, some 600 tonnes of synthetic diamonds are produced each year for industrial use alone.

They are used in a range of high-end technologies, such as lasers and high-pressure anvils. Some companies have also started to sell synthetic diamonds as gemstones. In response, diamond giant De Beers has set up a "Gem Defensive Programme" with the aim of finding ways to tell apart synthetic and natural diamonds.

I love this sort of thing, but the implications of theoretically increasing the world's total annual supply of gem-quality diamonds by 3000% should be having everyone in Antwerp shitting their pants. I can't wait for my new diamond-lens glasses.

[Kodiak]

It would lead to a revolution in diamond computing and other technologies. I applaud their efforts.

[Mayabird]

Good! It's about time the DeBeers cartel was taken down and the blood diamond business destroyed. They've been artificially inflating the prices and marketing the concept of the engagement ring (seriously, it's a very new thing invented by advertising) to sell their overpriced lumps of carbon to suckers who have to dish out a few weeks' wages to keep up with the Joneses.

I hope the diamond manufacturers are as successful as Mikimoto was in marketing his cultured pearls over "natural" pearls.

[RedImperator]

I think the engagement ring is here to stay; either with diamonds (at a significantly reduced price) or another gem. The diamond engagement ring might stick around; diamonds are pretty when properly set and virtually indestructible.

But yeah, fuck DeBeers.

[PeZook]

An engagement ring per se was around for a long, long time (if only amongst the rich), but the concept of a diamond ring was introduced purely by DeBeers.

Huh...my wife wanted a diamond ring for some time now. I think I'll hold off on buying one untill prices drop a bit

[CaptainChewbacca]

I'll hold out till I can put a cubic centimeter of synthetic diamond on a certain special lady's finger.

[Ariphaos]

I find the idea of a diamond ring appealing.

I don't mean a hunk of gold with an edged rock in it, either, I mean a diamond ring.

[Kodiak]

I find the idea of a diamond ring appealing.

I don't mean a hunk of gold with an edged rock in it, either, I mean a diamond ring.

that would be incredible, and with this technology, plausible.

[Singular Intellect]

This sounds great.

Any useful engineering and construction applications this will signficantly affect, or is this just an accomplishment of making lots of cheap shinies?

[Kanastrous]

This sounds great.

Any useful engineering and construction applications this will signficantly affect, or is this just an accomplishment of making lots of cheap shinies?

Diamond is a good viewport material for certain kinds of sensors - those working in the near infrared...I think.

[Samuel]

This sounds great.

Any useful engineering and construction applications this will signficantly affect, or is this just an accomplishment of making lots of cheap shinies?

Diamond is a good viewport material for certain kinds of sensors - those working in the near infrared...I think.

It also makes good blades- ground up and applied to the edge I think is all you need.

[tim31]

Read for the above: drilling becomes cheaper. Drilling is very expensive.

[Kanastrous]

Props to Larry Niven, of course, for having predicted this and used it as a story point, back in the sixties.

[Shogoki]

This is not really news (well, except for the microwave part) it was published quite a few years ago when they had just developed the CVD technology, and they were still trying to work out how to remove the yellow tint (i actually think they look prettier).

Anyway, the article says they're indistinguishable from natural ones, but what they said back then wasn't that. They said they were easy to distinguish upon close examination because, while natural diamonds still have some amount of imperfections, these were literally flawless.

[Surlethe]

In response, diamond giant De Beers has set up a "Gem Defensive Programme" with the aim of finding ways to tell apart synthetic and natural diamonds.

How are they going to do this? Carbon is carbon is carbon. The only conceivable way they could tell natural and artificial diamonds apart is that natural diamonds have flaws.

[CaptainChewbacca]

They'd have to stamp/etch every diamond they pull out of the ground, or develop some new technology.

[Samuel]

They'd have to stamp/etch every diamond they pull out of the ground, or develop some new technology.

So they are going to try to exploit the "nature is better" BS?

[ArmorPierce]

Natural is more expensive, hence better. With the previous yellow tinted diamonds that were being manufacturing I remember reporters going around asking women would they want a synthetic diamond vs a natural diamond where you couldn't tell any difference most of them opted for the natural one.

[loomer]

Most likely, and rely on the stupidity of people who'll take it seriously.

In any case, to hell with engagement rings! I want a cricketball sized Diamond I can throw at things to see what happens. Never has such an experiment been before conducted (even though the results are predictable - property damage and a lot of lawsuits)!

[Samuel]

Most likely, and rely on the stupidity of people who'll take it seriously.

In any case, to hell with engagement rings! I want a cricketball sized Diamond I can throw at things to see what happens. Never has such an experiment been before conducted (even though the results are predictable - property damage and a lot of lawsuits)!

So many things can be made out of diamond... diamond glasses, diamond toilets, diamond silverwear... you know someone will do it!

[Akhlut]

What about viewports and camera lenses/lens covers for ultra-deep sea subs? We can explore the Marianas trench without fear of the cameras breaking! Hell, could we grow a diamond box to put the thing in and just lower that?

[The Grim Squeaker]

Are there any benefits to replacing "normal" usages for glass (camera lenses, windows) with diamond? The usage for armoured windows is obvious (Neal Stephenson also mentioned it, but decades after Niven)? In addition, this might be a lot cheaper than regular diamonds, but that doesn't mean that it'll be cost effective compared to the items (apart from natural diamonds of course) that it might replace.

So many things can be made out of diamond... diamond glasses, diamond toilets, diamond silverwear... you know someone will do it!

What's wrong with that? I want diamond windows, a diamond car, and a chain made of solid diamond.

The only question is whether the house walls should be made of Diamondillium or Diamondtrillium

[Ender]

They'd have to stamp/etch every diamond they pull out of the ground, or develop some new technology.

I was under the impression that Debeers already laser etched a small DB onto all its diamonds.

[cosmicalstorm]

The women who demand a diamond ring are not interested in the diamond itself but rather in the fact that the guy had to spend X amount of dollars to buy it. They would probably be content with wearing a piece of dried up cows shit if they were certain you could only get ahold of one for thousands of dollars.

[Shinova]

This sounds great.

Any useful engineering and construction applications this will signficantly affect, or is this just an accomplishment of making lots of cheap shinies?

Unless it's been mentioned already, computing technology today relies on silicon. Diamond can also be used as the key component of computing and can do so better to such an extent that if silicon could hold 10,000 mp3s, diamond could hold 10,000 movies, so imagine an ipod except it's got tens of thousands of full-length, DVD-quality movies on it. It's that kind of difference, for speed as well as storage I figure, so imagine what the mass production and use of diamond in computing would do to the world as we know it. It would be the next computing revolution.