Forget billions of years: Researchers have grown diamonds in just 150 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Forget billions of years: Researchers have grown diamonds in just 150 minutes

charmingscience.com

60 pointsdargscisyhp61 comments

What's more important is that they demonstrated making diamond at 1 atm and lower temperatures(1025 C). This is compared to ~50,000 atm and ~1500 °C diamond is conventionally made at. The diamonds they made were very small, but this is a new process and optimization might enable it to make bigger diamonds.

Recently determined diamonds normally form in geysers when magma spurts up through layers of rock. Takes minutes, not billions of years. Anyway, cool article.

That's neat. Source?

Well, slightly harder to replicate under laboratory conditions.

Sort of like if there was an article saying we'd figure out how to harness fusion for power and someone responded with "big deal, have you seen the sun?".

Still interesting though.

Hey they brought it up, not me!

I remember when lab grown diamonds really took off, and deBeers and others started calling their diamonds "natural"

Buy our “Rare” Organic Non-GMO Rock!

you can ++ that by adding gluten free

Gluten? In my diamonds? It's more likely than you think

“artificial diamonds are radioactive” (because of Carbon 14)

1ppt of C14? That's s drop in an ocean.

Indeed, that's supposed to be a bullshit marketing argument used by the diamond cartel

This company should hire Lily James to make a counter commercial to the "only natural" campaign.

But will it really be the same if you didn't have some little kid dig them out of mines? /s

Jewelers have already done this successfully with a lot of gemstones. Artificial rubies, sapphires，and emeralds are dirt cheap, but natural ones are 100-1000x the price.

How do they tell the difference? Impurities?

The very cheap artificial sapphires are basically made by melting aluminum oxide in bulk. They're usually cut in a factory, so they don't look very nice. I got very large artificial ruby (also corundum) for my wife (actually to satisfy my own curiosity), and it basically killed all interest in rubies for her. It basically looks like a chunk of plastic. Under high magnification, you can supposedly see a lot of parallel curves lines of bubbles due to how the crystals are grown.

There are also nicer artificial sapphires which are grown in similar conditions as natural ones. These have inclusions similar to natural ones, but they are usually uniform in color. Natural ones tend to have parts that are more saturated. It's not a technical limitation though, so I'm sure you can make less perfect-looking artificial sapphires that can fool your average jeweler. However, gemological testing will use advanced spectroscopy, which spits out enough data to distinguish between natural and artificial ones.

Lab grown minerals should rebrand as "bloodless" to counter back.

If you think that will increase their appeal then you don't truly understand why diamonds are valuable. It's what they represent.

The princess doesn't want a gem on her finger that has been cultivated by a nerd and comes with a "vegan, soy-based, cruelty free" approval on it. She wants a warlord to return from conquering and pillaging foreign lands, leaving rivers of blood in his wake, to deliver the prize to his queen as a symbol of her value and his material investment and dedication to her.

Obviously no woman in her right mind is consciously thinking that, but that's the psychology behind it. "Bloodless" is icky.

I don't think you've been associating with the kinds of princesses that I have been.

Where do you find princesses anymore? Sweden?

They used to flock about Jarvis Cocker, the Sloane Rangers and Chelsea Daggers.

There's a London pub nicknamed the Sloaney Pony; maybe try there?

If you'd only read your Daily Mail or Tatler, you'd know to find Princess Gabriella in Monaco.

As far as reigning-house europeans go:

  Princess Elisabeth
  Princess Eléonore
  Princess Isabella
  Princess Josephine
  Princess Marie-Caroline
  Princess Amalia
  Princess Gabriella
  Princess Catharina-Amalia
  Princess Alexia
  Princess Ariane
  Princess Ingrid
  Infanta Leonor
  Infanta Sofía
  Princess Estelle
  Princess Adrienne
  Princess Charlotte
  Princess Lilibet

At press time, Princess Peach was in another castle.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY

It's pretty impressive what you can buy on eBay with the words "CVD Diamond" in the title. As best as I can tell, they're chemically identical. (Modulo honesty on eBay, of course.)

6 CT diamond for $600, not bad.

On that subject... I love gemstones. I just love them. But "real" aka "natural" ones tends to be very pricey.

Anyone know of reputable brands/places/sellers where I can buy synthetic / lab grown diamonds / sapphires / ruby etc. at a much cheaper price than "natural" ones?

Tairus is probably reputable. I've bought anything from them though. Sometimes I look at their page of roughs and unusual crystals.

My ex used to buy from best cut gems for her jewelry side hustle. She seemed pretty happy with them, but I dont know how the prices compare. There's also a subreddit about synthetic gems that has a vendor directory in their sidebar. I think the sub is synthetic gemstones.

obvious reference! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

I thought the real issue is that diamonds aren't uncommon (despite DeBeers) so weird manufacturing simply isn't profitable.

Lab-made diamonds are common in jewelry these days, and generally cheaper than mined diamonds. I bought some from Belk recently.

they are also better for industrial purpose if I remember correctly. And better from n ethical pov.

So what kind of cool/useful things could we make out of diamond if diamond were suddenly very cheap?

Diamond with nitrogen valance centers are used as fluorescent markers. If a current passes close they change their emission spectrum. Some workon this as a method to measure neurons firing. So maybe that use case expands. Also quantum applications with diamond.

A phone screen or camera lens that's harder to scratch?

Diamond bearings?

IDK if the technique can create such a large crystal though.

We don't actually want a phone screens that's harder to scratch. Mostly because it means that it will break more.

Anything with an edge: knives, drill bits, saws, scissors...maybe the last razor blade you'll ever buy!

If you make them cheap enough we can make windowpanes out of diamond.

This is the titular conceit of Neal Stephenson's novel the Diamond Age. In that fictional futuristic word almost anything can be manufactured in nanotechnological "material compilers". And according to the novel if you can do that, at scale it is cheaper, and easier to build transparent panes for windows out of diamond than glass because the chemical structure is simpler.

Diamond Age also posited ‘aerostats’ - macroscopic diamond structures that are structurally solid, but contain nothing but vacuum, enabling them to be used to generate buoyancy in air. Not sure how realistic the material physics of those is.

Apparently this is barely doable with current aerogels: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1c87pum/crush...

Why choose? There is such a thing as diamond aerogels:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/new-diamond...

I'm no physicist, but I'm inclined to try some contextual napkin math, and hopefully I won't botch it too badly trying to work on my phone as opposed to proper spreadsheet.

If we assume a 1m³ vacuum container at sea level, that's displacing ~1200g of air. So that's the upper mass limit on the diamond container (or foam) for it to be neutrally buoyant.

Let's assume the density of diamond is 3.5 g/cm³, which means the volume of diamond "skin" we have to work with is something less than 342 cm³ for whatever gets built.

A sphere with a volume of 1m³ has a surface area of ~48,300 cm², which means we can't go thicker than 0.07mm. The most common thickness for mechanical pencil refills is 0.50mm.

That said, I'm sure there is some square-cube law business in favor of much smaller chunks, like a bubble-foam of smaller vacuum-cells.

Diamonds thermodynamically want to turn into graphite under normal conditions, so I'm guessing that they inherently require more energy to create than glass. Sapphire is more shatter resistant than diamond anyways, so it would be more appropriate to use for something like a window.

I've always wanted that diamond sword from Bard's Tale.

Crazy efficient heat sinks, diamond’s thermal conductivity is off the charts.

And synthetic diamonds can be made to be supraconductive too.

Diamonds have lots of use in industry.

Answering to GP: diamonds happens to be really beautiful too, very shiny but not too shiny and not "not really shiny" like many lesser stones (like zirconium).

Many people like diamonds. Blame society, blame anything you want. But diamonds have fanclubs since thousands of years.

diamond pickaxe, obviously.

But what will we do about our new existential crisis... If we no longer need to dig for diamonds, why would we dig at all?

Ancient Debris, clearly.

Truffles.

Power electronics, maybe?

https://ece.illinois.edu/newsroom/63402

A substrate for CPU chips. In fact a lot of the synthetic diamonds for gemstones is a way to bootstrap the R&D for that end goal.

I just had an idea that may be my worst technology idea ever.

Assemble some unstable atoms (that decay into carbon) into the desired cubic structure. When they decay you have a diamond.

The problem with this is that if it can decay fast enough (even with outside neutrons) it will be too hot (pun intended), and if it decays slowly enough it will take too long. Depending on the source isotopes and process it could also result in a radioactive diamond! Also, the heat of the process would have to not change the crystal structure.

However, some day when we master quarks and the weak interaction we might be able to do this quickly and safely.

Why would this be easier than just making a diamond?

what part of "I just had an idea that may be my worst technology idea ever." did not make sense to you?

Hmm; so the only thing that can "easily" decay into the stable forms of carbon - C12 and C13 that is - is N13 (β+ to C13 with "minutes" half-life). Nothing decays into C12, since N12 or O12 would have half-lifes so short as to make them "doubtful" isotopes.

But Nitrogen wouldn't crystallise in a diamond lattice; nevermind the crystal absorbing "heat" from the radioactive decay disturbing positions temporarily, there's just no way to arrange Nitrogen and Carbon atoms into similar locations of a crystal lattice. This sort of "transmutation" isn't even science fiction, it's only a dream

(follow your dreams but think a few times before trying to make money off them)

Leaving aside the decay part of things, carbon makes a crystal structure of a diamond, other materials don't. So they would refuse to assemble into the right shape.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com