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You know what else De Beers is peeved about? Man-made diamonds. They're cheaper and more ethical than anything De Beers can find in Sierra Leone.

I got my wife a man made diamond from Apollo. http://www.apollodiamond.com/.
It's a real diamond, not cubic zirconium or anything. And it's geekly cool because it was made in a lab, and not just taken from the De Beers' diamond monopoly.
The sales guys I talked to were really nice, and they'll send you high res images of the stones they have in stock at the moment. I highly recommend them.

They're not quite identical - synthetic diamonds tend to be pinkish in color.

Hmm... somehow lost my link to Apollo, well here it is.

Pffft.... diamonds. Just cause its the most expensive gemstone, doesn't make it the prettiest. Now moissanite, there's a nice high tech and beautiful stone to put on a laptop, plus its rarer to boot.

I would have linked Charles and Colvrad's page but it's kinda cheesy, enjoy a wikipedia link instead (if you want to see the stones, check em out at a local jeweler, a web page does it no justice).

Now, the two big companies in the US to watch for Synthetic diamonds since nobody posted the links:
Gemesis: Use the traditional High Pressure, High Temp method.
Apollo Diamond Use a more innovative (and elusive) Carbon Vapor Depositation method.

The DOD is making some significant investment in carbon substrates for next generation chips.

http://www.apollodiamond.com/

That post was from when WIRED had their article on artificial diamonds. One of those two ( http://www.apollodiamond.com/ )is just about to have public selling of jewlery (yes I have been waiting as I won't even bother with the traditional "real" diamonds, the points have been previously made but yet again, no blood diamonds or incredible wastes of money for me ;D ). Sorry if someone else posted but I'm just taking a break from work and can't read every post in this thread.

Gemesis: http://www.gemesis.com/
Apollo: http://www.apollodiamond.com/

and now

Adia: http://www.adiadiamonds.com/

Gemesis were the first using Russian technology.

Did you know that the huge thermal conductivity, is why they are called ice, they always feel cold.

I recently got my fiancée a man made diamond from Apollo, and she loves everything about it, including the fact that it didn't come through the DeBeers cartel. Not to mention that it's just cool, in the geeky way. The quality and size of the ring are indistinguishable from a mined diamond.

I saw that and tried to buy one of these 'cultured' diamonds back then. The only man made diamonds you could buy were yellow, pink, etc. Sure, super rare, yada, yada, yada... but many months of looking you could not find the classic clear diamond. If folks are starting to sell the clear diamonds, this is big news.

1a. http://gemesis.com/wheretobuy/usa.htm
1b. http://gemesis.com/wheretobuy/europe.htm1
1c. http://gemesis.com/wheretobuy/asia.htm

2. http://chatham.com/ (they sell from their website)

Honorable Mention: http://www.apollodiamond.com/
They will have a webstore "in 2006", but will take "special requests" in the meantime.

Indeed, most artificial diamonds today are an intense orange-yellow colour because of the nitrogen introduced during processing.

True, Gemesis makes yellow diamonds. But later this year, Apollo (SWF warning) plans to introduce jewelry featuring its colorless diamonds. De Beers is scared.

http://www.apollodiamond.com/

They'll custom make a jem for you and your wife.
I have no idea how much it will cost, but honestly to screw over deBeers, it would be worth it.

Actually, there's exactly one place. Apollo Diamonds.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml

http://www.apollodiamond.com/

If your looking for clear your only choice is http://www.apollodiamond.com/ they don't make it clear where you can buy their diamonds and I have not been able to find a source. If you can deal with color- yello blue or pink then you can use Gemesis http://www.gemesis.com/ You can buy loose gemesis stones online from http://www.diamondscultured.com/ and get it monuted by a local jewler.

Apollo created diamonds are inherently upper grade stones, with low inclusion, and a high brilliance. Apollo created diamonds can be used in jewelry products requiring the highest quality gemstones. Apollo grown Diamonds are produced in matched color sets and range in size from 5 points to 1 carat, fully faceted diamonds.

Here's the link to Apollo Diamond's homepage..

No information about purchasing though.. anyone have further info?

"I don't think man made diamonds are ever going to eclipse natural ones for jewelry" - I will have to disagree with you there.

I know there will always be a niche market (read people with more sense than money) who will always want naturally grown diamonds, however I think most folks will actually not care. Most (uneducated) diamond buyers simply look for 3 things beauty, cost , and carat (wow factor). This is the only reason stores such as Zales can stay in business. They sell the worst diamonds around (I-2's for their regular merchandise - usually up to $1500 and SI-2's for their "Zales Diamond", note that most reputable jewlers won't touch I-2 diamonds). The reason Zales (and other maul stores) sell so much merchandise is first location and 2nd the design, pricing and wow factor (1 carart ring for how much?!).

Now back to synthetic diamonds, eventually most folks will realize that choosing a natural diamond over a synthetic just "'cause it has to be naturally grown" is like choosing furniture built of trees that were grown naturally in a forrest vs using trees that were planted and grown on a farm. There both real trees (plus you'll get less defects in your furniture with the farm grown trees).

Now there's already a lot of companies out there growing diamonds. Check out:

Gemesis in Florida
Apollo Diamond (which uses Carbon Vapor Deposition)
Life Gem- turn the ashes of a deceased loved one into a diamond
There was also an interesting article about it on Wired a ways back: The New Diamond Age

And lastly the one "book" that taught me everything I could have ever wanted to know about the diamond business: The Diamond Invention Very interesting read.

Intersting note, after all the research and shopping (and shopping and more shopping) that I did when I was looking for an engagement ring (including researching Synthetic Diamonds) I decided on having a ring custom made by a local jeweler using moissanites instead of diamonds. Ended being a very beautiful and unique ring of a much higher quality than a mass produced setting and with quite a bit of geek factor to it as well. So I think folks will be accepting of synthetic diamonds once production ramps up to the demand (right now Gemesis is growing as fast as it can).

Read their Industry scheme for regulation. Note the phrase "Not to buy any diamonds from suspect or unknown sources of supply". That's all about market control.

Before the "Kimberly Process", diamonds were generally bought and sold, even in DeBeers showings, with no indication of origin. So introducing synthetic diamonds into the market was easier. With the "Kimberly Process" in place, it's much tougher.

The diamond industry has been lobbying countries to require that synthetic diamonds be labelled in some way. The term "cultured diamonds" is widely used, but there's litigation in Germany to require some more negative term, like "synthetic".

DeBeers has also developed identification devices, the DiamondSure and the DiamondView to try to sort out synthetic and natural diamonds. The diamonds produced in high-pressure presses can be identified without much trouble. But grown diamonds are tougher to identify.

Long term, diamond prices will probably crash, like sapphire did once you could buy sapphire bar, tube, and rod.

Generally speaking, lab-grown crystals of any material used as a gemstone -- most notably the corundum group (sapphires and rubies) -- will have fewer imperfections than mined stones. Both the growth process and the "ingredients" are controlled. There are some trade-offs, though: most lab rubies tend to look pinkish and glassy in comparison to mined rubies, because the growth process is so fast. Lab-grown emeralds usually have too much of a blue tint, and that gives them away. When the only use is in jewelry, appearance is the overriding consideration.

However, that's not the case here. Most lab-created corundum, for instance, isn't used in the jewelry trade. Since it was first "grown" in the late 1800s, various industrial and commercial applications have accounted for most of the production. One example is the "glass" plate over the laser in the grocery barcode scanner: actually made from colorless "sapphire" because it is both harder and tougher than glass. The same goes for lab-created diamonds, which can be used in all kinds of ways. A quick Google search on technological applications turns up a whole mess of hits, and you can see for yourself what one of the manufacturers has to say about potential uses.

The one compay I know that claims to produce clear diamonds, using vapor deposition is Apollo. But the company is pretty secretive and basically no one had a chance to evaluate the claims. Apparently they're still growing a diamond seeding plate with a large enough diameter to make the process commercially viable.

Apollo Diamond, Inc. (http://www.apollodiamond.com/) currently sells optical grade synthetic diamonds at a quality, scale and cost perfect for mass use in new technologies and devices. An arrangement could be made to bring the cost of new products and research way down to consumer levels.

You can also buy diamonds in wafer form for other uses. With 3mm, 10mm, and soon, 25mm square wafers available, they are perfect for MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) optical systems or any other kind of semiconductor or microelectronics applications.

From their site:

"Apollo advanced technology diamond, a new high purity Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) grown monocrystal diamond is available in large sizes for advanced industrial applications. The diamond is low nitrogen type IIa bulk crystal and comes in water white optical grade or traditional manufacturing grade single crystal blocks."

and...

"The Apollo semiconductor/optical grade diamond is a new, high purity chemical vapor deposition grown monocrystal diamond wafer, available in large sizes for high performance semiconductor and optical applications. These diamonds are low nitrogen, type IIa monocrystalline diamond wafer crystals, water white optical grade, and suitable for semiconductor and optical applications."

Note: I don't work for Apollo Diamonds or for anyone else in the industry.

Forget graphite.
This sounds like a job for Apollo Diamond.

Apollo Diamond's cultured gemstones will break the De Beers diamond cartel, and after Apollo Diamond's patents expire in a couple decades, the bottom will fall out of the diamond market. The music industry, on the other hand, has the near-impossibility of writing a legally original song to back it up.

Diamond age approaching?

Yes, there are even commercial ventures.Ok, tongue out of my cheek now.

I am frankly tired of hearing nanotech predictions from the following kinds of people:

• Anyone primarily trained in computer science. Bill Joy, please stop talking. You are not in any conceivable sense qualified.
• Anyone who has not published in a mainstream peer-reviewed physics/materials science journal in the last three years. Eric Drexler, please either get into the lab, collaborate with someone who is, or stop talking.
• Anyone without a Ph.D. I know this sounds harsh, but without real-world experience you just can't understand how difficult research is. This isn't just a really hard engineering project, like building a Space Shuttle or an atomic bomb. This isn't remodulating the sensor array in 5 minutes like they do on Star Trek. This is being lost without a light in a dark cave deep underground, fumbling to find your path and not knowing if the exit is 100 feet or 100 miles away.

The people who are truly qualified don't weigh in very often, in part because they realize how silly it is to make such predictions.

Or perhaps you'd rather print some diamond

Actually, that patent doesn't expire until 2023 or so.

For those of you who haven't followed diamonds for a while, De Beers is arguably the largest and most prolific monopoly in the world, having survived, among other incidents, an American anti-trust inquiry with its reputation, and vicariously that of diamonds, entirely unscathed.

There are several forms of producing synthetic diamonds, and the closer these synthetic diamonds are to real ones, the more likely the company will be bought and all its intellectual property dissolved.

One company is Apollo Diamond, I recall. From what I understand, their research is conducted in the back of a pharamacy in an undisclosed mall somewhere in the USA.

Apparently, threatening to undermine a multi-billion dollar industry is very risky. I seem to recall there have been numerous coincidental deaths related to diamonds, diamond mines, and synthetic diamonds. Like all things involving enormous economics, life, liberty, and security of person are hardly the most important.

Actually, diamonds are dirt cheap. Nice ones for your girlfriend are expensive because they're big and clean.

True now, but not for long. Apollo Diamond has received U.S. patents on its method of growing nearly-perfect cultured diamond crystals through vapor deposition. Competition with the De Beers cartel should drive prices down until the patent runs out in under 20 years, when the bottom will truly fall out of the diamond market.

Actually, it's currently being done by Apollo Diamonds and Gemesis, which was mentioned above. De Beers is fighting them as hard as they can, but even if they convince the public that manmade diamonds aren't worth anything as jewelry, they will still be able to use them for computing. However, production is not quite ready for large-scale chip manufacturing, which is why Intel and others have not yet turned to diamonds.

there is a corporation in Boston which is developing ultra-pure diamonds using a vapor disposition techinque

You're thinking of Apollo Diamond, which plans to use revenues from selling vapor deposition gemstones to fund research into diamond semiconductors. There's a nice writeup about synthetic diamonds at E2.

However, in many markets, synthetic diamonds sold as gemstones have to be labeled as synthetic, giving De Beers an out: "A diamond isn't forever if it was grown in a lab five days ago."

Apollo Diamond is now making near perfect crystal diamonds by vapor deposition. Their product has fewer flaws than natural diamonds. Since the diamond jewelry industry has been making a big deal out of "flawless" diamonds for a century, they're stuck - the industrial process is better than the natural one. Semiconductor process technology has been making near perfect crystals of silicon, quartz, sapphire, ruby, etc. for years, after all. This is just the next step.

Sapphires used to be rare gems. Not anymore. Linde Chemical started making synthetic star sapphires in the 1970s. Then sapphires went into volume production. Then the patents ran out. This is where the sapphire industry is now:

• We can currently supply ingots, blanks, windows and wafers up to 200 mm in diameter, bar stock up to 100 mm square and ribbons up to 80 mm wide. All sapphire products are available in stages ranging from raw through polished for epitaxial growth. With six grades of synthetic sapphire, Maintech is sure to meet needs of the customers. Processors and end users now have an opportunity to take advantage of extraordinary prices from Maintech, Inc. Normal turnaround time is FOUR WEEKS!

A few years, and bulk diamonds will be on the Home Shopping Channel.