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DIAMONDS IN THE NEW DECADE

DIAMONDS FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE:
ON THE EDGE OF SCIENCE’S FRONTIER

 

With the holiday season drawing to a close and the end-of-year shopping season soon to be in the rear mirror, it may be time to change gears and consider the world’s most popular gemstone from a different perspective.  For while the diamond primarily fascinates jewelry consumers, it’s a mineral of interest to many others, and particularly those in the scientific community, for a variety of reasons. Here are some of those.

DIAMONDS AS SEMICONDUCTORS

Researchers at Saga University reported this year that they had have developed a groundbreaking diamond semiconductor, whose output power is the highest ever reported for semiconductor devices.

According to the researchers, these diamond semiconductor devices could replace vacuum tubes, which are conventionally used in the very-high-frequency and very-high-power applications, leading to increased output power in Beyond-5G wireless base stations, communication satellites, television broadcasting stations and radar.

The diamond semiconductor devices were developed by Saga University together with Adamant Namiki Precision Jewel Company, which has devised a method for mass-producing high quality, ultrahigh-purity diamond wafers. Exhibiting drastically increased output power and no degradation phenomena, its capability is close to silicon carbide and gallium nitride, which dominate the market of power electronic devices.

DIAMOND DETECTING THE COVID VIRUS

From the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology comes the report of the development of diamond-based quantum sensors to detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Existing tests for the virus include rapid tests that detect specific viral proteins, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that take several hours to process. Neither can quantify the amount of virus present with high accuracy, and even The gold-standard PCR tests might have false-negative rates of more than 25 percent.

The new Approach developed at MIT uses atomic-scale defects in tiny bits of diamond, called nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers. Extremely sensitive to minute disturbances due to quantum effects taking place in the diamond, the nanodiamonds are coated with a material that is magnetically coupled to them and bonds only with the specific RNA sequence of the virus. When the virus RNA is present, it bonds to this material, disrupting the magnetic connection and changing the diamond’s fluorescence, so that can be easily detected with a laser-based optical sensor.

According to the MIT team, the new test could bring down false negative rates to under 1 percent, and detect a few hundred strands of the viral RNA within a second.

SUPERHARD DIAMOND GLASS

Scientists at Jilin University in Changchun, China, have announced the creation of new form of carbon glass, consists of randomly oriented clusters with diamond-like order, and possessing highest hardness, resistance to being deformed elastically when a stress is applied to it, and thermal conductivity observed in any known amorphous material.

Because of the very high melting point, above 4,500 Kelvin, it was impossible to use actual diamond as the starting point to synthesize diamond-like glass. But the researchers made a breakthrough using fullerene, a form of carbon composed of 60 molecules arranged to form a hollow ball. It was heated just enough to collapse its oval structure, turning the carbon into crystalline diamond under pressure.

The viable use of any new glass materials hinges on being able to produce large enough pieces. The comparatively low temperature at which the scientists w at Jilin University are able to synthesize the new ultrahard diamond glass means that its eventual its mass production is more likely.

DIAMONDS REVEAL GEOLOGICAL SECRETS

One of geology’s more confounding mysteries is the mineral makeup of the earth’s core. Scientists have long believed that the deep mantle is largely composed of silicate minerals with a perovskite crystal structure.

But while calcium and magnesium silicate perovskites have been synthesized in the laboratory decades ago, they are not stable below pressures of 20 gigapascals. The high pressure of the lower mantle starts about 660 kilometers underground and extends about 2,000 kilometers below that.

But now, according to an article in Science magazine, researchers have identified natural calcium silicate perovskite as an inclusion of a diamond sourced from Botswana. The super-hard diamond not only preserved a high-pressure mineral inclusion but also preserved the pressure itself, said geologist Ho-Kwang Mao.

The presence of the perovskite crystal confirms the depth and pressures under the earth at which some diamonds are formed. The pressures in the lower mantle reach as high as 136 gigapascals, which is 1.4 million time more than the air pressure at sea level.

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