Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A New Technique For Creating Diamonds Discovered

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-researchers-best-friend dept.

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."

12 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 Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > found out to their chagrin when they tried to cash in 10 years late

      One doesn't usually purchase diamond jewelry to make a direct profit. One purchases diamond jewelry to hide the assets and keep its ownership and sale out of official record keeping. It was the economic salvation of many immigrant families to have at least a few stones secreted in their luggage, and in some cases even inside their own bodies.

    2. 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.

    3. Re: deBeers will buy them out. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Selling individual diamonds at a profit, even those held over long periods of time, can be surprisingly difficult. For example, in 1970, the London-based consumer magazine Money Which? decided to test diamonds as a decade long investment. It bought two gem-quality diamonds, weighing approximately one-half carat apiece, from one of London's most reputable diamond dealers, for £400 (then worth about a thousand dollars). For nearly nine years, it kept these two diamonds sealed in an envelope in its vault. During this same period, Great Britain experienced inflation that ran as high as 25 percent a year. For the diamonds to have kept pace with inflation, they would have had to increase in value at least 300 percent, making them worth some £400 pounds by 1978. But when the magazine's editor, Dave Watts,tried to sell the diamonds in 1978, he found that neither jewelry stores nor wholesale dealers in London's Hatton Garden district would pay anywhere near that price for the diamonds. Most of the stores refused to pay any cash for them; the highest bid Watts received was £500, which amounted to a profit of only £100 in over eight years, or less than 3 percent at a compound rate of interest. If the bid were calculated in 1970 pounds, it would amount to only £167. Dave Watts summed up the magazine's experiment by saying, "As an 8-year investment the diamonds that we bought have proved to be very poor." The problem was that the buyer, not the seller, determined the price.

      The magazine conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for £745. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was £568. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid £2,595. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was £1,000.

      In 1976, the Dutch Consumer Association also tried to test the price appreciation of diamonds by buying a perfect diamond of over one carat in Amsterdam, holding it for eight months, and then offering it for sale to the twenty leading dealers in Amsterdam. Nineteen refused to buy it, and the twentieth dealer offered only a fraction of the purchase price.

    4. Re:deBeers will buy them out. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem with diamonds (for us little folks, at least) has always been that you buy diamonds at retail, but sell them at wholesale.

      There is a solution: eBay. At your local mall, the retail price is about double the wholesale price. On eBay, you can buy a certified diamond, from a dealer with a 99.5% approval rating, for about 10% over wholesale. I bought a loose diamond for an engagement ring on eBay, paid $50 to have it appraised, and then had it mounted on a ring that my fiancee picked out. Saved myself about a full month's paycheck.

    5. Re: deBeers will buy them out. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why diamond rather than gold? The value density is a little bit lower(assuming a decent quality stone); but metals tend to have a much, much, smaller gap between purchase price and sale price at any given time; can be divided if necessary without reducing their value, and are similarly imperishable, fairly hard to trace, and likely to have a buyer available almost anywhere.

      As an 'investment', gold has a pretty tepid history; but at least you can actually buy and sell at reasonably close to the nominal market price, rather than eating a large automatic loss the moment you buy.

  2. De Beers is going to be pissed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    'To maintain the perception that diamonds were rare, De Beers not only significantly limited how many diamonds they mined each year, but also literally started buying up all the other diamonds and just stockpiling them (along with their own excess supply). Combined with a decades-long advertising campaign, they created a perception out of thin air that diamonds were rare and valuable, and that you had to drop thousands of dollars on one to prove you loved your spouse. The monopoly De Beers holds is so blatantly illegal by U.S. antitrust laws that they've been banned from selling in the U.S. (they're forced to sell to intermediaries on the international market). Until they pleaded guilty to price fixing charges in 2004, their executives wouldn't even set foot on American soil because they feared they'd be arrested on sight. While there are indications that the cartel might finally be slowly losing its grip on the market, it's been a pretty damn impressive run.' http://www.cracked.com/article... http://www.cracked.com/article...

    1. Re:De Beers is going to be pissed by JoeyRox · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Da Beers will use the same marketing strategy they use against existing man-made diamonds - telling consumers on how "organic" diamonds are somehow better:

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

  3. Women's reaction to protential a price drop by batistuta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Women always want diamonds because they are "beautiful". If their price drops to the floor, I wonder whether they will still like them on their wedding rings. Truth is, most women don't care about what they wear, as long as they have the feeling that you bought them something special. And if their friends envy them, then it's even better.

    1. Re:Women's reaction to protential a price drop by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Women always want diamonds because they are "beautiful".

      No. They want them as a demonstration of their potential mate's commitment and willingness to expend resources. Peacocks grow big tail feathers. Men buy diamonds. The reason is the same.

      If their price drops to the floor, I wonder whether they will still like them on their wedding rings.

      Of course not. A cubic zirconium gem looks just as good as a diamond, yet few women would knowingly accept a CZ engagement ring.

    2. Re:Women's reaction to protential a price drop by labnet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Women always want diamonds because they are "beautiful". If their price drops to the floor, I wonder whether they will still like them on their wedding rings. Truth is, most women don't care about what they wear, as long as they have the feeling that you bought them something special. And if their friends envy them, then it's even better.

      Good summary. A woman is actually looking to be valued which requires the man to suffer pain. Pain in researching, pain in the wallet. Flowers are similar. For example, flowers from a service station are much less valuable than flowers from a florist, even though the product might be very similar. The service station is convenient and cheap; so the woman perceives your love for her as convenient and cheap.
      I'm not saying this is bad thing; it is just the way most women are wired.

      --
      46137
  4. What Size? by tinkerton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Size matters with diamonds and I find nothing about size.
    There is a large industrial market for tiny diamonds and these can be made in more than one way. This is probably about making the tiny ones cheap.

    There are detonation diamonds, created in the high pressure of contained explosions. Iran has gotten a lot of attention for their work on that in Parchin because if they do contained explosions that can only be because they want to make nukes.