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The history of the diamond industry is full of conflicts, unregulated work and monopolies. Not only that, these sparkling gems take billions of years in the deep recesses of the Earth under immense pressure and heat to compress before they are ready to be turned into jewelry or industrial machines – hence their extreme rarity and price.
As a result, scientists have scrambled to find a viable method of making diamonds in a lab that is cheaper, faster, and more ethical than traditional diamond hunting.
Now, researchers from Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University have developed a method that can create diamonds in minutes at room temperature – a feat never achieved before.
“Natural diamonds usually form over billions of years, about 150 kilometers deep in the Earth, where there are high pressures and temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius,” ANU Research School Professor Jodie Bradby said in a statement. of Physics.
Using a new method they describe in their study published in Small, the researchers synthesized two types of diamond: the normal type used for jewelry and a type of diamond called Lonsdaleite which is theoretically harder than cubic diamond but is only found in meteorites. of graphite.
To create the diamond, the glassy carbon is compressed under extreme pressures. Glassy carbon is a crystal-free form of carbon that, when compressed into diamond anvil cells, can form diamond veins.
Diamond has been synthesized in the laboratory since H. Tracy Hall achieved the first commercially successful synthesis in 1954, but the process is incredibly expensive and requires both intense pressure and extremely high temperatures. However, by changing the way pressure is applied, the researchers found that high temperatures may not be necessary after all.
“The turning point in the story is how we apply pressure. In addition to very high pressures, we also allow carbon to experience something called ‘shear’, which is like a torsion or creep force. We think this allows for carbon atoms. to move into position and form the Lonsdaleite and the normal diamond, ”said Professor Bradby.
It has not yet been proven that the process produces significant quantities of diamond. The results suggest that both diamond and lonsdaleite can be synthesized at room temperature, but now more needs to be done to improve the process. Both materials are extremely useful in a variety of industries, from the slicing of ultra hard materials to biomedical applications that include drug detection and delivery. If these could be produced in large enough quantities, they could have huge implications.
“Lonsdaleite has the potential to be used to cut ultra-solid materials at mining sites,” said Professor Bradby.
“Creating more of this rare but super useful diamond is the long-term goal of this work.”
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