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Science

Scientists Produce Rare Diamonds In Minutes At Room Temperature (newatlas.com) 141

Posted by BeauHD from the under-pressure dept.
A reader writes: While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they not only form quickly, but do so at room temperature.

This latest breakthrough was led by scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University, who used what's known as a diamond anvil cell, which is a device used by researchers to generate the extreme pressures needed to create ultra-hard materials. The team applied pressure equal to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe, doing so in a way that caused an unexpected reaction among the the carbon atoms in the device. "The twist in the story is how we apply the pressure," says ANU Professor Jodie Bradby. "As well as very high pressures, we allow the carbon to also experience something called 'shear' -- which is like a twisting or sliding force. We think this allows the carbon atoms to move into place and form Lonsdaleite and regular diamond."

These regular diamonds are the type you might find in an engagement ring, while Lonsdaleite diamonds are rarer and found at meteorite impact sites. Using advanced electron microscopy, the team was able to examine the samples in detail, and found that the materials were formed within bands they liken to "rivers" of diamond. The team hopes the technique can enable them to produce meaningful quantities of these artificial diamonds, particularly Lonsdaleite, which is predicted to be 58 percent harder than regular diamonds. "Lonsdaleite has the potential to be used for cutting through ultra-solid materials on mining sites," Bradby says. The research was published in the journal Small, while you can hear from the researchers in this video.
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Scientists Produce Rare Diamonds In Minutes At Room Temperature More

Scientists Produce Rare Diamonds In Minutes At Room Temperature

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  • 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe (Score:5, Funny)

    by WarBrood ( 1550125 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:10AM (#60745794)
    Imperial units again...
  • Hopefully, innovation like this will finally bring down the cost of diamonds and crack the monopoly DeBeers has on expensive womenâ(TM)s jewelry.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • They created a few microscopic particles.

      Their technique does not scale up, so DeBeers has no reason to worry.

      At best, this will lead to better sandpaper and drill bits.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @04:28AM (#60745946)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • I swear I heard a Tim Allen grunt after reading that statement.

        • Bort Bort Bort!

        • Even the cheap ones are grand. I recently used some harbor freight diamond dremel bits to waller out some holes in 3/16 steel plate, lube 'em with a little soapy water spray and they just turn steel into a paste with a quickness. Loverly.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shotgun ( 30919 )

            Ooooh! Thank you for the tip.

            The problem with diamond coated cutting tools is that they diamond is usually brazed onto the substrate, usually with brass. Get the tool hot (300C ?), the braze melts and cutting stops. Get it a little hotter, and the diamond "burns". Cutting also stops.

            I hadn't considered SOAPY water to keep the coolant on the tool.

            I use the the diamond wheel to sharpen carbide lathe and milling tool bits.

            • Yeah I just had it handy, I use it for testing LP connections. I figured it would work nicely, and I was right.

              The next thing I need to try in the department of cutting fluids is making my own for [hot] steel on steel action. I read that bacon fat with 5% flower of sulfur is the absolute best thing you can use, but I haven't tried it yet. You can get the flower of sulfur at garden shops.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Greyfox ( 87712 )
          I want a seamless diamond car body. Or at least a diamond windshield.

      • so DeBeers has no reason to worry

        DeBeers is already a dying breed and are being massively undercut by existing scaled up technology producing synthetic diamonds. Ever wonder why the narrative changed from: "Get her the perfect diamond" in the 90s to "Get her a natural diamond" today? Mainly because we can already produce diamonds cheaper and more perfect than what DeBeers have in their vault.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Barny ( 103770 )

      I mean, you could watch the video linked and find out that these will never be of a size useful for jewelry, or you could just make a comment and ignore that.

      Oh, you already made your choice.

    • The best way to fight that would be to consider diamond jewelry the result of a misogynistic ad campaign and to shame anyone who wears diamonds. It is a fact that the value of a diamond drops to almost nothing the instant you are handed the box.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        The best way to fight that would be to consider diamond jewelry the result of a misogynistic ad campaign and to shame anyone who wears diamonds. It is a fact that the value of a diamond drops to almost nothing the instant you are handed the box.

        Yep. Just don't buy diamond. When I got engaged to my wife, instead of a diamond engagement ring we got her a white sapphire ring. Virtually impossible to tell it's not a diamond unless you have it side by side with one, and it was a fraction of the price of a comparably sized diamond. Remember, diamonds are really only "rare" because DeBeers and similar buy them all up and control the supply. And don't get me started on "chocolate" diamonds, which is really just a way to sell common, low quality diamo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shotgun ( 30919 )

        The value was almost nothing BEFORE you were handed the box.
        I can get a 4" tile cutting blade or concrete grinder disk from Harbor Freight, coated with diamond chips, for less than $10.

    • It is totally artificially inflated. That company vaults millions of diamonds a year for the sole purpose of keeping them out of public hands in order to keep the prices high.

      Lonsdaleite is one of the substances harder than diamond. It is one of the materials I researched for a book Ive been working on. We know how different molecular structures of carbon can create things like graphene and diamond. I would like to see the results of doing that with other metals like iron. Or perhaps Aluminum oxide

  • The team applied pressure equal to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe, ...

    Can you put that in layman's terms?

    [ To be fair to the editors/TFS, that was in TFA and I didn't see anything more ... "scientific" -- (sigh). ]

    • 80 GPa (Gigapascals) (Score:5, Informative)

      by johnjones ( 14274 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:33AM (#60745850) Homepage Journal

      or for the Americans 800000 bar

      The SI unit of pressure is not African elephants but pascal (Pa), equal to one newton per square metre (N/m2, or kgm1s2). - lowly subeditor

    • Can you put that in layman's terms?

      It's about half the weight of your mother in her hobnail boots.

    • The team applied pressure equal to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe, ...

      Can you put that in layman's terms?

      [ To be fair to the editors/TFS, that was in TFA and I didn't see anything more ... "scientific" -- (sigh). ]

      One of your mum.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:19AM (#60746132)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:28AM (#60746148)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • ...because at the moment something like 300 tonnes is required on a very small area to make this diamond ...

        I think we can be sure that the number of physicists per square metre in this team is zero. If you are speaking scientifically pressure is a _force_ per unit area, not a mass per unit area.

      • Being able to manufacture macroscopic sheets of diamond, even thin ones, is a material scientist's wet dream. It has high hardness, high thermal conductivity, low electrical conductivity, reasonable chemical resistance, exceptional dimensional stability, and it's made from a very common element.

        We Will Watch Your Career With Great Interest - Shiv Palpatine

      • “We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve to see if we can do that,” Bradby said.”If we can get the pressure right down to a reasonable level – because at the moment something like 300 tonnes is required on a very small area to make this diamond – if we can get that down much lower, then you can start to get into the area where bulk amounts of it can be manufactured. And that’s what the dream is.”

        I can't wait to see the price of Lonsdaleite windows!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      Somewhere in the vicinity of 1.3 Gigapascals, I think.

  • Just askin'. I don't know the weight of an african elephant and which elephant to use but i know the weight of a BMW m135i. Then again, there are multiple ways to decide on that too.

    • An average African bush elephant has a mass of about 6000 kg.

      A ballerina on one foot en pointe [wikipedia.org] will have about 8 square centimeters in contact with the floor.

      640 * 6000 kg * 9.81 m/s^2 / (8 * 0.01^2m) = 4.7e10 N.

      or 465,000 atmospheres.

      Disclaimer: I didn't double-check my math.

      • Using well rounded numbers and avoiding the use of excessive significant digits that becomes

        Elephant in tutu: 1 tonne per square cm or 1e3*1e4kg/m2
        acceleration 10m/s2
        so pressure is 1e8N/m2
        500 elephants yields 5e10N/m2
        or 500,000 bar
        or using 5bar/10m pressure increase inside the earth, the equivalent of 1000 km depth.

  • Don't cover onion articles please, it's a waste of our time.

  • Call me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:29AM (#60745838)

    Call me when someone develops diamonds that are natural-looking and cheap enough to break the Debeers monopoly.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by CODiNE ( 27417 )

      Synthetic diamonds are flawless that's how they're immediately spotted. Thus not "natural" looking. However on price the issue is that cutting them costs the same whether natural or synthetic.

      • Can't we "grow" the synthetic diamonds in molds*?

        * molds as in containers that shapes materials as they solidify, not mold as in fungus. Also, why isn't there two different words for this in english?

      • Synthetic diamonds are flawless that's how they're immediately spotted. Thus not "natural" looking.

        When you often need a jewelers loop and/or well-trained eye to tell the difference, tell me again why this should matter in the industry?

        The diamond still quite often represents marriage. How ironic that spoiled customers insist on imperfection in the diamond that supposedly represents the prefect bond between two humans. And women actually wonder why men complain that you can never please them? Talk about THE prime example.

        "No, no, no. This diamond has a flaw! Not good enough."

        "No, this diamond isn

    • Re:Call me (Score:5, Informative)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @04:16AM (#60745912) Journal
      They already exist. And the Beers have reacted as can be expected of a monopoly. [reuters.com]

      At first they stayed away from artificial diamonds, and tried to sell us on "natural" ones, because of course no one would want to pop the question while proffering some nasty artificial cheap stone, right? They even planned to engrave a tiny tiny de Beers logo in each natural diamond stone, and provide jewelers with a scope to look for these "watermarks". I don't know if they ever went forward with that plan, but that's how hard it is to tell the real thing from the fake ones.

      But they saw the writing on the wall: artificial diamonds are cheaper and you can't tell them apart from the real thing anymore. So de Beers bought a couple of companies making artificial diamonds, and they started dumping, lowering the price to a point where companies entering the market might find it hard to make a profit, so that de Beers can control this market as well. It's actually in their interest to make artificial diamonds cheaper: the wider the price gap, the more it sets apart natural diamonds as something special. An $800 artificial stone competes with a $1000 natural one. The same artificial stone at $50 doesn't.

      • I'll bet money that ALL the stones they sell are actually artificial.
        I mean they are a profit-maximizing corporation. Duh. "Shareholders demand it!"

        Now THAT is something to break DeBeers. :)
        So please spread. ^^

        • I've known since long that that's been the case for years, even though I just read it in your post. Yes, let's spread.

        • I'll bet money that ALL the stones they sell are actually artificial.

          You'd be wrong. That would make no sense for a company to stockpile $4bn worth of product only to not sell it.

        • If you already own the mines and the child slaves, it might be cheaper to mine the real deal instead of fuffing around with elephants and ballerina shoes.

      • I don't know if they ever went forward with that plan, but that's how hard it is to tell the real thing from the fake ones.

        If you line up carbon atoms in the configuration that produces a nigh-indestructable jewel, it's a diamond. The circumstances of its creation are irrelevant.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vyvepe ( 809573 )

          If you line up carbon atoms in the configuration that produces a nigh-indestructable jewel, it's a diamond.

          I would not call something which burns at about 900 C as indestructible. Fire is easy and a simple blowtorch will do.

      • The same artificial stone at $50 doesn't.

        If it doesn't then you should save yourself the time and effort and just break up now before she splits later with half your stuff. After all your relationship is only based on money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pacinpm ( 631330 )

      AFAIK artificial diamonds are good enough they are required to be physically marked as artificial. Also natural diamonds are cheap to mine. It's the monopoly which rises their prices.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        AFAIK artificial diamonds are good enough they are required to be physically marked as artificial.

        While a certain company would love this to be the case, I can't imagine any (non corrupt) legislature passing a law that forced this.

        But then I don't wear expensive jewels, and wouldn't buy them for someone.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shotgun ( 30919 )

          The question you pose devolves to, "Is there such a things as a non corrupt legislature?"
          I think they are probably as rare as natural diamonds.

      • Agreed. It has long been stated that de Beers has at any given time one million near perfect one karat stones only to keep the price high.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Call me when someone develops diamonds that are natural-looking and cheap enough to break the Debeers monopoly.

      Just get a white sapphire. Quarter of the cost of a diamond. Virtually indistinguishable from a diamond if you are wearing it, can only tell a difference side by side. However, you do have to clean it more often to keep up the sparkle factor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Call me when people stop buying diamonds as a fashion accessory when it takes a skilled assayer and a microscope to tell you the difference between them and many other things.

      I understand them for industrial use, but cosmetic diamonds - natural or not - are just a showboating waste of time and energy. They aren't even worth it as an investment.

  • The fact that the process takes little time and the diamonds are even harder than standards points towards cheaper manufacture of industrial diamond. That would be my angle. On the issue of an elephant in a tutu, it is good to have a reference but this is not a reference. International units are a reference though often a weak one. One reference I would be interested in is the pressure normally used when creating diamonds. Another one would be how deep in the earth you'd have to be to get that pressure.

  • 640 African Elephants, you say? (Score:5, Funny)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:36AM (#60745856)

    That aught to be enough for anyone!

    But... are those laden or unladen African elephants?

    Bad jokes... sometimes I just gotta tell bad jokes.

    Ryan Fenton

  • Apparently 0 proof liquors are close enough to the concentration of water and alcohol used for diamond synthesis that even rotgut Tequila can be used

    https://phys.org/news/2008-11-... [phys.org]

    There was some colorful humor r after the announcement about what happened to the Tequila worm in the process.

  • "...The team applied pressure equal to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe, doing so in a way that caused an unexpected reaction..."

    Yeah, if you're not careful, you're going to get an unexpected reaction from the International Union of Horses.

    How dare you not use horsepower when we use it to measure everything from lawnmowers to cargo ships...

  • This team of Australian scientists can now finally afford to get married to those gold-diggers they met in a bar somewhere.

  • Units of measure (Score:4, Funny)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @08:49AM (#60746278) Journal

    " 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe" I'm sorry, but unless you use more standard units of measure like "Libraries of Congress" or "Olympic-sized swimming pools" I can't understand wtf you're talking about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      " 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe" I'm sorry, but unless you use more standard units of measure like "Libraries of Congress" or "Olympic-sized swimming pools" I can't understand wtf you're talking about.

      But how are you going to get a shoe on a building?

  • Article take-away (Score:3)

    by yo303 ( 558777 ) on Friday November 20, 2020 @10:09AM (#60746460)

    OK, Slashdotters, stop making fun of the units, and talking about deBeers.

    The important information here is that they are using shearing as well as pressure, and are detecting lonsdaelite, a stronger-than-diamond hexagonal-cell carbon lattice. Diamond is cubic lattice structure.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • OK, Slashdotters, stop making fun of the units, and talking about deBeers.

      LOL, OK. Maybe tell that to the Gold-plated Troll that purposely included 640 Elephants in TFS then.

      The important information here is that they are using shearing as well as pressure, and are detecting lonsdaelite, a stronger-than-diamond hexagonal-cell carbon lattice. Diamond is cubic lattice structure.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Thanks for that, but perhaps below is the real story behind a structure that has been around since the 60's and yet hardly anyone has ever heard about a "stronger-than-diamond" material that allegedly has tons of "potential":

      "[Lonsdaleite] hardness is theoretically superior to that of cubic diamond (up to 58% more), according to computational simulations, but natural specimens exhibited somewhat lower hardness through a large range of values (from 7 to 8 on Mohs hardness scale). The cause is speculated as being due to the samples having been riddled with lattice defects and impurities."

      Seems the only thing "harder" here, is the challenge in creating a perfect Lonsdaleite lattice. We can at least accept imperfections in diamonds. Certainly not trying to shit on progres

  • The article shows images of diamonds at 500 nanometer scale. What is new about this is that only high pressure is used, but not high temperature. This is interesting because high pressure had to be used with high temperature, but it does not mean "this technique produces diamonds big enough to see in minutes". The ones you get in minutes are still microscopic.

  • We have been producing diamond in huge quantity for a long time with various methods. The one I used during my master was a plasma of H2+CH4 with a silicon wafer which was seeded with micro diamond dust, then over 24h we were growing big ass lens of diamon about 4 mm thick, and 3 to 4 cm wide. Fun time. That was back in 1991 btw to give you a bit of estimate on time. Last time I looked they were making diamond for jewelry by the kilogram, heck give them the form you want, and add some flaw to make them like
  • ...about how to use elephants in the HR dept [srellim.org] as :

    Scientists: stockpile 640 elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe and turn carbon into diamonds.

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