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A New Technique For Creating Diamonds Discovered

schwit1 writes: In discovering a new solid state for carbon scientists have also discovered that it is a relatively inexpensive way to produce diamonds. The researchers have found that, depending on the substrates, tiny diamonds will form within the Q-carbon, suggesting that they have actually discovered how diamonds are formed deep below the Earth. The hot high pressure environment there allows Q-carbon to naturally form, and in the process of its solidification diamonds are a byproduct. According to Gizmag: "Professor Jay Narayan of North Carolina State University is the lead author of three papers describing the work that sees Q-carbon join the growing list of carbon solids, a list that includes graphite, graphene, fullerene, amorphous carbon and diamond. He has suggested that the only place Q-carbon might be found in the natural world is in the core of certain planets. The researchers created Q-carbon by starting with a thin plate of sapphire (other substrates, such as glass or a plastic polymer, will also work). Using a high-power laser beam, they coated the sapphire with amorphous carbon, a carbon form with no defined crystalline structure. They then hit the carbon with the laser again, raising its temperature to about 4,000 Kelvin, and then rapidly cooled, or quenched, the melted carbon. This stage of quenching is where 'Q' in Q-carbon comes from."

2 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. deBeers will buy them out. by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are way more diamonds available than an open market will support (as anyone who bought "investment grade" diamonds found out to their chagrin when they tried to cash in 10 years later and can't even get the price they paid). The only way for deBeers to continue to maintain the cartel is to do the same they did when the Russians threatened to flood the market - make a deal.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    1. Re:deBeers will buy them out. by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Informative

      The problem with diamonds (for us little folks, at least) has always been that you buy diamonds at retail, but sell them at wholesale. So that pretty much rules them out as "investment grade" anything.