Scientists have used a new technique to synthesize diamonds at normal, atmospheric pressure and without a starter gem, which could make the precious gemstones easier to grow in the lab.
Folks like de beers hoard diamonds and jack up prices to make folks think they are more rare that what they really are. We gotta stop the cycle and buy lab grown or use an entirely different stone all together. Diamonds are for basic bitches anyhow
Recommend looking into moissanite also if you like diamonds but don't want to support the industry. Very similar looking, better in some ways. And because it hardly occurs naturally at all, you can only buy synthetic.
Everyone always thinks the jewelry when they think of diamonds but I am excited for the prospects of what cheap lab-grown diamonds can do for manufacturing. Diamonds are electrically insulative and yet 10 times more thermally conductive than copper. There are a LOT of industries that would be VERY interested in that.
Hell, it would probably be useful in CPU substrate as well. Instead of silicon semi conductor doping if these could be made precisely enough you could use diamond for the insulation layers and gain that insane heat transfer efficiency to help with avoiding Hotspots. Maybe that's too thin to matter that much not sure
Silicon carbide is much more interesting for the semiconductor industry. With pure carbon there is a lot of lattice mismatch between diamond and single crystal silicon which introduces strain and defects, both of which reduce yield in chip manufacturing.
I have a tungsten steel nozzle on mine and it's been good for a long time, I imagine it'll run forever. Does anybody have experience with the diamond ones? Are they worth the extra expense?
Similar conditions are employed in the method currently used to synthesize 99% of all artificially created diamonds. Called high-pressure and high-temperature (HPHT) growth, this method uses these extreme settings to coax carbon dissolved in liquid metals, like iron, to convert it to diamond around a small seed, or starter diamond.
Cool. I don't know how expensive this process is right now, but it seems cheaper to do, at least on mass production.
Edit: I wonder if they could make a tether out of this thing.
However, the new method has its own challenges. One problem is that the diamonds grown with this technique are tiny; the largest ones are hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the ones grown with HPHT. That makes them too small to be used as jewels.
Just wear hundreds of thousands of them glued together, problem solved.
On a more realistic note though, the applications of this will probably be industrial for a good while. I found it interesting how the article mentions that they were able to develop a diamond coating over their growth substrate. That probably has some cool applications in industrial settings where diamond-plated materials are used.
they are small, but the large diamonds are made from seeds, so still can be used for that, or techniques can improve for larger size production in the future, also, small diamonds are useful for cutting machines
Either JPL or LM (I can't remember which) was working on a HTHP system with the goal of being able to grow diamonds with ICs built in. I wonder if this has that potential.