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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

Do diamonds react to any type of fields or anything? Is there a way to invent a diamond detector much like a metal detector?

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Hit it with a clean 785nm laser and the rovibrational modes of the crystal lattice downconvert (and upconvert aka anti-stokes but I digress...) about 1/10^6 photons to: http://www.bayspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ramspec-78...

Unfortunatly, that's a bit tricky if it's underground. Fun to bring to a gem show though.

Diamonds are just compacted carbon. If you could create a device that detected dense carbon objects, then it could find diamonds.

This hypothetical device would also find every living organism around it as well so it would be kinda useless.

I'm not a scientist but surely theres a threshold density for diamonds that is far above rocks/living objects?

> surely theres a threshold density for diamonds that is far above rocks

Nope, diamond is 3.51g/cm³, some rocks are in the same density range.

Diamond's density is 3.5 g/cm3, nothing special.

Density of rocks seems to top out around 3.2 g/cm³[0], but if you could find a way of scanning for material that was 99%+ Carbon and which had the density of diamond (3.51 g/cm³) and you could detect very small buried items, then that might be a start.

https://chem.libretexts.org/Ancillary_Materials/Exemplars_an...

And since carbon is the 4th most frequent atom in the universe, you would also find a whole bunch of not-so-interesting things.

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