Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

For those concerned about distinguishing 'natural' from 'synthetic' diamonds (not really that meaningful IMO other than maintaining artificial scarcity of a luxury/status item), there's a simple fix: use atmospheric carbon as the building material. Atmospheric CO2 has trace amounts of carbon-14 (~1 per 10^12 C atoms) and the resulting beta-decay-mode emissions can be easily easily detected.

Practically, this means the methane fed into the chemical vapor deposition process has to be extracted from biogas (say, a chicken manure digester) or directly synthesized from air and hydrogen (Sabatier process). This feedstock will contain the same trace amount of carbon-14 as the atmosphere and will be incorporated into the resulting diamond.

This seems like such an obvious thing to do for various reasons. It allows the (increasingly irrelevant) natural diamond industry to easily distinguish between their product and synthetic products. Not only that, there's probably a huge market for such 'atmospheric diamonds' among the people interested in green products, or tech products. Finally, while the cost of synthesizing methane feedstock is still quite a bit higher than just using natural gas, that's negligible relative to the cost of the final product and shouldn't be a factor.

Time to go write up a business plan, isn't it?

P.S. full paper here:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/srep44462

> This seems like such an obvious thing to do for various reasons. It allows the (increasingly irrelevant) natural diamond industry to easily distinguish between their product and synthetic products.

Surely we would want the opposite? I..e for someone to unload a ton of lab-grown diamonds indistinguishable from "natural" ones, to once and for all kill the racket run by De Beers and friend.

They’d have to drive the cost down to barely above minimally viable real costs and scale larger than debeers to accommodate the induced demand of dirt cheap diamonds proliferating through the market. Swarovski/cz/generic translucent stone market’s would also be crushed by this.

>This seems like such an obvious thing to do for various reasons

Do this enough as a carbon sequestration method, and save the environment!

Yeah, you just need a lot of renewable energy and somewhere to put a new, extra posh mountain range.

And then we can finally finish the first second of eternity. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/117.txt

Already done, there were atmosphere-carbon diamonds on sale at Selfridges corner shop a couple of months back.

Right you are, they seem to have the whole process running. Just in one location, though.

https://skydiamond.com/our-process

> Each carat of mined diamond has a footprint of over 100kg of carbon dioxide and over 500kg of greenhouse gases in total.

The report by Imperial College London Consultants, cited by Sky Diamond, highlights the environmental and climate costs of mining so-called precious stones:

http://www.imperial-consultants.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/202...

One more reason to ensure that synthetic diamonds cannot be identified or differentiated as such, given the high environmental impact of extracting that carbon allotrope from the ground.

There is a CVD diamond detector available called Yehuda. It makes some sort of distinction based on the phosphorescence.

https://www.riogrande.com/knowledge-hub/videos/how-does-the-...

If you're trying to forge a diamond to bypass this particular technique, one can use methane extracted from the earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com