Gems are usually made after billions of years of carbon powder and being very hot beneath the earth’s surface – this is exactly what makes them greedy.
Now, scientists in Australia say they have accelerated the process in just a few minutes – and at room temperature.
An international team of researchers led by Australian Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said on Wednesday that they had created a balance between the top of the ballet shoe using a pressure equivalent to 64040 African elephants at room temperature. .
The researchers said they were able to create two types of structurally distinct diamonds – one similar to those commonly worn with jewelry and the other type of lonsdelite, which occurs naturally at the site of meteorite effects and is harder than most diamonds.
Synthetic diamonds themselves are not new, and have already been made in labs since the 1940s to find cheap, ethical and environmentally friendly stones.
But researchers were excited to create such diamonds at room temperature, especially the hardened lollipop diamond, which has the potential to cut “ultra-solid” materials at mining sites, they said.
The long-term goal of this work is to make more out of this rare but super-useful diamond, said Xingxu Huang, an ANU scholar working on the project. “Being able to make two types of diamonds at room temperature was exciting to get in our lab for the first time.”
A huge twisting, sliding force
To form the diamond, the researchers applied heavy pressure to create a “twisting or sliding force” that believed the carbon atoms had moved in place, said Jody Bradby, a physics professor at ANU.
“Natural diamonds have generally been formed for billions of years. The earth is about 1 kilometer deep (about miles miles) deep where high pressures and temperatures exceed 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit).” “The turning point in the story is how we apply pressure.”
Dugal McCulloch, professor of physics at RMIT, who co-led the research, and his team used advanced electron microscopy techniques to cut from experimental specimens to understand how they were formed.
When the team studied the samples they found diamond veins of both regular and lonsdalite.
“It was just amazing to see these small ‘rivers’ of lonsdaleite and regular diamonds for the first time and really helps us understand how they form.”
Researchers from the University of Sydney Sydney and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA, were also involved in the research.
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