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| USA TODAY
Should you say “I do” to lab-grown diamonds?
Diamonds made in a lab are chemically and physically identical to natural diamonds, and they are a rapidly growing trend, thanks to millennia and Gen Z.
The creation of diamonds normally takes billions of years, gigantic pressure and extremely hot temperatures.
But an international team of scientists are defying nature – successfully producing the beautiful mineral in a laboratory at room temperature and in just a few minutes.
Scientists from Australian National University (ANU), RMIT University, University of Sydney and Oak Ridge National Laboratory published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Small.
The co-authors announced Wednesday that they were using high pressure “the equivalent of 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe” to create two types of diamonds: the type found on an engagement ring and Lonsdaleite, a type of diamond found in nature at the site of meteorite impacts.
Diamonds have been synthesized in laboratories since 1954. Jewelry is generally created by subjecting carbon to intense pressure and heat. This is the first time that the dazzling mineral has been made at room temperature.
“Natural diamonds generally form over billions of years, about 150 kilometers away [93 miles] deep in the Earth where there are high pressures and temperatures above 1000 degrees Celsius [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit]Jodie Bradby, ANU physics professor and co-principal investigator, said in an ANU press release.
“The turning point is how we apply pressure,” she continued. “In addition to very high pressures, we allow the carbon to also undergo something called ‘shear’ – which is like a twisting or sliding force. We believe that this allows carbon atoms to snap into place and form. Lonsdaleite and ordinary diamond. “
Using advanced microscopy techniques, Dougal McCulloch, a physics professor at RMIT who also co-led the research, and his team captured sliced samples to better understand the two types of diamonds.
“Seeing these little ‘rivers’ of Lonsdaleite and regular diamond for the first time was just amazing and really helps us understand how they might form,” said McCulloch.
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