The Hindu Business Line : Scientists on track to mass-produce synthetic diamonds

WASHINGTON: Scientists are on track to mass-produce cheap and perfect diamonds in extra large, a development that threatens the natural diamond market.

A research team led by Russell Hemley, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, produced diamonds by chemical vapour deposition (CVD), where carbon atoms in a gas are deposited on a surface to produce diamond crystals.

It means there is no theoretical limit on the size of diamonds that can be grown in the lab. “The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated.

The breakthrough will allow us to push to kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality,'' says Hemley's Carnegie Institute colleague Ho-kwang Mao. The new technique is so efficient that the synthetic diamonds contain fewer impurities than those found in n ature, said Yufei Meng, who also participated in the experiments.

“We once sent one of our lab-grown diamonds for jewellery identification, it wasn't told apart from natural ones,'' Meng said. Alexandre Zaitsev, a physicist at the City University of New York, said: “When considered in combination with the high-growth- rate technique of CVD diamonds, it seems to be a starting point of mass-scale production of perfect diamond material at a low price.''

According to the report on the New Scientist website, the improving quality of synthetic diamonds threatens the natural diamond market. While 20 tonnes of natural diamonds are mined annually, some 600 tonnes of synthetic diamonds are produced each year f or industrial use alone.

They are used in a range of high-end technologies, such as lasers and high-pressure anvils. Some companies have also started to sell synthetic diamonds as gemstones. In response, diamond giant De Beers has set up a “Gem Defensive Programme'' with the aim of finding ways to tell apart synthetic and natural diamonds, the report said. – PTI

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