Synthetic diamonds may have just gotten way easier to make…These gems don’t require tremendous pressure to form.
FreeThink | May 6, 2024 | Kristin Houser

South Korean researchers have developed a new technique for creating synthetic diamonds — and they think they’ve only scratched the surface of its potential.

Synthetic diamonds: Aside from jewelry, diamonds are used in drilling, manufacturing, healthcare, quantum computing, and more. The cost and uncertainty of finding the right kind of diamonds in nature inspired scientists to see if they could make them in the lab.

In the 1950s, a team at General Electric pulled it off using a process called “high-pressure high-temperature” (HPHT), which mimics the conditions that create diamonds in nature. This process is still used to make 99% of synthetic diamonds, though one called “chemical vapor deposition” (CVD), which doesn’t require high pressures, also works.

Both techniques are far faster than the natural method, producing diamonds in weeks instead of eons, but they require expensive equipment, and diamonds produced using them are typically limited in size.

What’s new? Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have announced a new way to make synthetic diamonds under ambient pressure in under three hours.

The technique starts with creating a liquid metal alloy out of four elements (gallium, iron, nickel, and silicon). The mix is then exposed to methane and hydrogen gasses at a temperature of about 1025 C (1877 F) and a pressure of 1 atm (the same as air at sea level).

Though the researchers don’t fully understand how or why, something about this combination of ingredients and conditions causes the carbon in the gasses to form a diamond film on top of the alloys, which can later be detached and applied to other surfaces.

Looking ahead: This is still early research, and more work is needed to determine how the new technique for creating synthetic diamonds compares to existing ones in terms of cost. So far, the largest of the team’s diamond films is just tens of micrometers wide, but they believe the technique is scalable, which could make it useful for many diamond applications.

So, savvy interns will start asking for cash or real estate instead, huh?

I picture an “Ocean’s Eleven”-type caper where they coat a bunch of cubic zirc with a diamond surface that passes every scientific test, much to the discomfort of Tony DeMafooch. Or maybe swap out the royal jewels from the Tower of London, while making love to Julia Roberts in the next cell. Although I think those chicks from Austin Powers were much hotter, and were British already.