How to make instant diamonds

Thursday 19 November 2020 10am

An international team of scientists has found a way to speed up the creation of diamonds, making them in a room-temperature lab in mere minutes.

One of the lead researchers, Professor Jodie Bradby, said their breakthrough shows that Superman may have had a similar trick up his sleeve when he crushed coal into diamond, without using his heat ray.

 “Natural diamonds are usually formed over billions of years, about 150 kilometres deep in the Earth where there are high pressures and temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius,” said Professor Jodie Bradby, from Electronic Materials Engineering in the ANU Research School of Physics.

The team, led by ANU and RMIT University, made two types of diamonds: the kind found on an engagement ring and another type of diamond called Lonsdaleite, which is found in nature at the site of meteorite impacts such as Canyon Diablo in the US.

The team, including former ANU PhD scholar Tom Shiell now at Carnegie Institution for Science, previously created Lonsdaleite in the lab only at high temperatures.

This new unexpected discovery shows both Lonsdaleite and regular diamond can also form at normal room temperatures by just applying high pressures – equivalent to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe.

“The twist in the story is how we apply the pressure. As well as very high pressures, we allow the carbon to also experience something called ‘shear’ – which is like a twisting or sliding force. We think this allows the carbon atoms to move into place and form Lonsdaleite and regular diamond,” Professor Bradby said.

Co-lead researcher Professor Dougal McCulloch and his cross-institutional team at RMIT used new, advanced electron microscopy techniques to capture solid and intact slices from the experimental samples to create snapshots of how the two types of diamonds formed.

“Our pictures showed that the regular diamonds only form in the middle of these Lonsdaleite veins,” Professor McCulloch said.

“Seeing these little rivers of Lonsdaleite and regular diamond for the first time was just amazing and really helps us understand how they might form.”

Lonsdaleite, named after the crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society, has a different crystal structure to regular diamond. It is predicted to be 58 per cent harder.

“Lonsdaleite has the potential to be used for cutting through ultra-solid materials on mining sites,” Professor Bradby said.

“Creating more of this rare but super-useful diamond is the long-term aim of this work.”

Ms Xingshuo Huang is an ANU PhD scholar working in Professor Bradby’s lab.

“Being able to make two types of diamonds at room temperature was exciting to achieve for the first time in our lab,” Ms Huang said.

The team, which included University of Sydney and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, have published the research findings in the journal Small.

Contact

Prof Jodie Bradby
E: jodie.bradby@anu.edu.au
T: (02)61254916

Further reading

read more

Related news stories

The pressure's on: making diamonds that are harder than diamond

Imagine telling your boss that you need to spend $1000 each on two diamonds – for work. But you will use them to create more diamonds!  The catch? You will probably break them in the process (so maybe we’d better get some spares). In this talk Professor Jodie Bradby takes us into...

New diamond harder than ring bling

The Australian National University (ANU) has led an international project to make a diamond that’s predicted to be harder than a jeweller’s diamond and useful for cutting through ultra-solid materials on mining sites.   ANU Associate Professor Jodie Bradby said her team –...

Purple diamonds - stunning jewellery or revolutionary technology?

With the world record sale of a purple diamond for $29.3M, it seemed the right time to chat to our diamond expert, Professor Neil Manson, about what a diamond actually is, and how one determines if they are “pure” and “flawless”. Not surprisingly, the media hype doesn’t...

New silicon promises sunnier days for solar tech

An international research team led by The Australian National University (ANU) has made a new type of silicon that better uses sunlight and promises to cut the cost of solar technology. The researchers say their world-first invention could help reduce the costs of renewable electricity below...