[tt] Smothsonian Magazine: Diamonds on Demand

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Diamonds on Demand
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/diamonds-on-demand.html

Lab-grown gemstones are now practically indistinguishable from mined
diamonds. Scientists and engineers see a world of possibilities;
jewelers are less enthusiastic

* By Ulrich Boser
* Smithsonian magazine, June 2008

I'm sitting in a fast-food restaurant outside Boston that, because
of a nondisclosure agreement I had to sign, I am not allowed to
name. I'm waiting to visit Apollo Diamond, a company about as
secretive as a Soviet-era spy agency. Its address isn't published.
The public relations staff wouldn't give me directions. Instead, an
Apollo representative picks me up at this exurban strip mall and
drives me in her black luxury car whose make I am not allowed to
name along roads that I am not allowed to describe as twisty, not
that they necessarily were.

"This is a virtual diamond mine," says Apollo CEO Bryant Linares
when I arrive at the company's secret location, where diamonds are
made. "If we were in Africa, we'd have barbed wire, security guards
and watch towers. We can't do that in Massachusetts." Apollo's
directors worry about theft, corporate spies and their own safety.
When Linares was at a diamond conference a few years ago, he says, a
man he declines to describe slipped behind him as he was walking out
of a hotel meeting room and said someone from a natural diamond
company just might put a bullet in his head. "It was a scary
moment," Linares recalls.

Bryant's father, Robert Linares, working with a collaborator who
became a co-founder of Apollo, invented the company's
diamond-growing technique. Robert escorts me into one of the
company's production rooms, a long hall filled with four
refrigerator-size chambers bristling with tubes and gauges. As
technicians walk past in scrubs and lab coats, I glance inside the
porthole window of one of the machines. A kryptonite-green cloud
fills the top of the chamber; at the bottom are 16 button-size
disks, each one glowing a hazy pink. "Doesn't look like anything,
right?" Robert says. "But they will be half-caraters in a few
weeks."

In 1796, chemist Smithson Tennant discovered that diamond is made
out of carbon. But only since the 1950s have scientists managed to
produce diamonds, forging them out of graphite subjected to
temperatures as high as 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures
55,000 times greater than that of earth's atmosphere. But the stones
were small and impure. Only the grit was useful, mostly for
industrial applications such as dental drills and hacksaw blades.
Over the past decade, however, researchers such as Linares have
perfected a chemical process that grows diamonds as pure and nearly
as big as the finest specimens hauled out of the ground. The
process, chemical vapor deposition (CVD), passes a carbon gas cloud
over diamond seeds in a vacuum chamber heated to more than 1,800
degrees. A diamond grows as carbon crystallizes on top of the seed.

Robert Linares has been at the forefront of crystal synthesis
research since he started working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New
Jersey, in 1958. He went on to start a semiconductor company,
Spectrum Technologies, which he later sold, using the proceeds to
bankroll further research on diamonds. In 1996, after nearly a
decade working in the garage of his Boston home--no kidding, in the
garage, where he'd set up equipment he declines to describe--he
discovered the precise mixture of gases and temperatures that
allowed him to create large single-crystal diamonds, the kind that
are cut into gemstones. "It was quite a thrill," he says. "Like
looking into a diamond mine."

Seeking an unbiased assessment of the quality of these laboratory
diamonds, I asked Bryant Linares to let me borrow an Apollo stone.
The next day, I place the .38 carat, princess-cut stone in front of
Virgil Ghita in Ghita's narrow jewelry store in downtown Boston.
With a pair of tweezers, he brings the diamond up to his right eye
and studies it with a jeweler's loupe, slowly turning the gem in the
mote-filled afternoon sun. "Nice stone, excellent color. I don't see
any imperfections," he says. "Where did you get it?"

"It was grown in a lab about 20 miles from here," I reply.

He lowers the loupe and looks at me for a moment. Then he studies
the stone again, pursing his brow. He sighs. "There's no way to tell
that it's lab-created."

More than one billion years ago, and at least 100 miles below the
surface of the earth, a mix of tremendous heat and titanic pressure
forged carbon into the diamonds that are mined today. The stones
were brought toward the surface of the earth by ancient underground
volcanoes. Each volcano left a carrot-shaped pipe of rock called
kimberlite, which is studded with diamonds, garnets and other gems.
The last known eruption of kimberlite to the surface of the earth
happened 47 million years ago.

Diamonds have been extracted from almost every region of the world,
from north of the Arctic Circle to the tropics of western Australia.
Most diamond mines start with a wide pit; if the kimberlite pipe has
a lot of diamonds, miners dig shafts 3,000 feet or more deep. In
areas where rivers once ran over kimberlite seams, people sift
diamonds from gravel. Loose diamonds used to turn up in fields in
the Midwest in the 1800s; they were deposited there by glaciers.
Most geologists believe that new diamonds continue to form in the
earth's mantle--much too deep for miners to reach.

The word "diamond" comes from the ancient Greek adamas, meaning
invincible. People in India have mined diamond gems for well over
2,000 years, and first-century Romans used the stones to carve
cameos. Over the ages, diamonds acquired a mystique as symbols of
wealth and power. During the 16th century, the Koh-i-Noor, a
109-carat diamond from the Kollur mine in southern India, was
perhaps the most prized item on the Indian subcontinent. Legend held
that whoever owned it would rule the globe. "It is so precious,"
noted a writer at the time, "that a judge of diamonds valued it at
half the daily expense of the whole world." Great Britain got the
stone in 1849 when Lahore and Punjab became part of the British
Empire; the diamond now sits in the Tower of London, the centerpiece
of a crown made for Queen Elizabeth in 1937.

And yet diamonds are simply crystallized pure carbon, just as rock
candy is crystallized sugar--an ordered array of atoms or molecules.
Another form of pure carbon is graphite, but its atoms are held
together in sheets rather than rigidly attached in a crystal, so the
carbon sloughs off easily, say, at the tip of a pencil. Thanks to
the strength of the bonds between its carbon atoms, diamond has
exceptional physical properties. It's the hardest known material, of
course, and it doesn't react chemically with other substances.
Moreover, it's fully transparent to many wavelengths of light, is an
excellent electrical insulator and semiconductor, and can be tweaked
to hold an electrical charge.

I'm sitting in a fast-food restaurant outside Boston that, because
of a nondisclosure agreement I had to sign, I am not allowed to
name. I'm waiting to visit Apollo Diamond, a company about as
secretive as a Soviet-era spy agency. Its address isn't published.
The public relations staff wouldn't give me directions. Instead, an
Apollo representative picks me up at this exurban strip mall and
drives me in her black luxury car whose make I am not allowed to
name along roads that I am not allowed to describe as twisty, not
that they necessarily were.

"This is a virtual diamond mine," says Apollo CEO Bryant Linares
when I arrive at the company's secret location, where diamonds are
made. "If we were in Africa, we'd have barbed wire, security guards
and watch towers. We can't do that in Massachusetts." Apollo's
directors worry about theft, corporate spies and their own safety.
When Linares was at a diamond conference a few years ago, he says, a
man he declines to describe slipped behind him as he was walking out
of a hotel meeting room and said someone from a natural diamond
company just might put a bullet in his head. "It was a scary
moment," Linares recalls.

Bryant's father, Robert Linares, working with a collaborator who
became a co-founder of Apollo, invented the company's
diamond-growing technique. Robert escorts me into one of the
company's production rooms, a long hall filled with four
refrigerator-size chambers bristling with tubes and gauges. As
technicians walk past in scrubs and lab coats, I glance inside the
porthole window of one of the machines. A kryptonite-green cloud
fills the top of the chamber; at the bottom are 16 button-size
disks, each one glowing a hazy pink. "Doesn't look like anything,
right?" Robert says. "But they will be half-caraters in a few
weeks."

In 1796, chemist Smithson Tennant discovered that diamond is made
out of carbon. But only since the 1950s have scientists managed to
produce diamonds, forging them out of graphite subjected to
temperatures as high as 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures
55,000 times greater than that of earth's atmosphere. But the stones
were small and impure. Only the grit was useful, mostly for
industrial applications such as dental drills and hacksaw blades.
Over the past decade, however, researchers such as Linares have
perfected a chemical process that grows diamonds as pure and nearly
as big as the finest specimens hauled out of the ground. The
process, chemical vapor deposition (CVD), passes a carbon gas cloud
over diamond seeds in a vacuum chamber heated to more than 1,800
degrees. A diamond grows as carbon crystallizes on top of the seed.

Robert Linares has been at the forefront of crystal synthesis
research since he started working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New
Jersey, in 1958. He went on to start a semiconductor company,
Spectrum Technologies, which he later sold, using the proceeds to
bankroll further research on diamonds. In 1996, after nearly a
decade working in the garage of his Boston home--no kidding, in the
garage, where he'd set up equipment he declines to describe--he
discovered the precise mixture of gases and temperatures that
allowed him to create large single-crystal diamonds, the kind that
are cut into gemstones. "It was quite a thrill," he says. "Like
looking into a diamond mine."

Seeking an unbiased assessment of the quality of these laboratory
diamonds, I asked Bryant Linares to let me borrow an Apollo stone.
The next day, I place the .38 carat, princess-cut stone in front of
Virgil Ghita in Ghita's narrow jewelry store in downtown Boston.
With a pair of tweezers, he brings the diamond up to his right eye
and studies it with a jeweler's loupe, slowly turning the gem in the
mote-filled afternoon sun. "Nice stone, excellent color. I don't see
any imperfections," he says. "Where did you get it?"

"It was grown in a lab about 20 miles from here," I reply.

He lowers the loupe and looks at me for a moment. Then he studies
the stone again, pursing his brow. He sighs. "There's no way to tell
that it's lab-created."

More than one billion years ago, and at least 100 miles below the
surface of the earth, a mix of tremendous heat and titanic pressure
forged carbon into the diamonds that are mined today. The stones
were brought toward the surface of the earth by ancient underground
volcanoes. Each volcano left a carrot-shaped pipe of rock called
kimberlite, which is studded with diamonds, garnets and other gems.
The last known eruption of kimberlite to the surface of the earth
happened 47 million years ago.

Diamonds have been extracted from almost every region of the world,
from north of the Arctic Circle to the tropics of western Australia.
Most diamond mines start with a wide pit; if the kimberlite pipe has
a lot of diamonds, miners dig shafts 3,000 feet or more deep. In
areas where rivers once ran over kimberlite seams, people sift
diamonds from gravel. Loose diamonds used to turn up in fields in
the Midwest in the 1800s; they were deposited there by glaciers.
Most geologists believe that new diamonds continue to form in the
earth's mantle--much too deep for miners to reach.

The word "diamond" comes from the ancient Greek adamas, meaning
invincible. People in India have mined diamond gems for well over
2,000 years, and first-century Romans used the stones to carve
cameos. Over the ages, diamonds acquired a mystique as symbols of
wealth and power. During the 16th century, the Koh-i-Noor, a
109-carat diamond from the Kollur mine in southern India, was
perhaps the most prized item on the Indian subcontinent. Legend held
that whoever owned it would rule the globe. "It is so precious,"
noted a writer at the time, "that a judge of diamonds valued it at
half the daily expense of the whole world." Great Britain got the
stone in 1849 when Lahore and Punjab became part of the British
Empire; the diamond now sits in the Tower of London, the centerpiece
of a crown made for Queen Elizabeth in 1937.

And yet diamonds are simply crystallized pure carbon, just as rock
candy is crystallized sugar--an ordered array of atoms or molecules.
Another form of pure carbon is graphite, but its atoms are held
together in sheets rather than rigidly attached in a crystal, so the
carbon sloughs off easily, say, at the tip of a pencil. Thanks to
the strength of the bonds between its carbon atoms, diamond has
exceptional physical properties. It's the hardest known material, of
course, and it doesn't react chemically with other substances.
Moreover, it's fully transparent to many wavelengths of light, is an
excellent electrical insulator and semiconductor, and can be tweaked
to hold an electrical charge.

It's because of these admittedly unglamorous properties that
lab-produced diamonds have the potential to dramatically change
technology, perhaps becoming as significant as steel or silicon in
electronics and computing. The stones are already being used in
loudspeakers (their stiffness makes for an excellent tweeter),
cosmetic skin exfoliants (tiny diamond grains act as very sharp
scalpels) and in high-end cutting tools for granite and marble (a
diamond can cut any other substance). With a cheap, ready supply of
diamonds, engineers hope to make everything from higher-powered
lasers to more durable power grids. They foresee razor-thin
computers, wristwatch-size cellphones and digital recording devices
that would let you hold thousands of movies in the palm of your
hand. "People associate the word diamond with something singular, a
stone or a gem," says Jim Davidson, an electrical engineering
professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. "But the real
utility is going to be the fact that you can deposit diamond as a
layer, making possible mass production and having implications for
every technology in electronics."

At the U.S. Naval Research Lab, a heavily guarded compound just
south of the U.S. Capitol, James Butler leads the CVD program. He
wears a gold pinky ring that sparkles with one white, one green and
one red diamond gemstone, all of them either created or modified in
a lab. "The technology is now at a point that we can grow a more
perfect diamond than we can find in nature," he says.

Butler, a chemist, pulls from his desk a metal box that brims with
diamonds. Some are small, square and yellowish; others are round and
transparent disks. He removes one wafer the size of a tea saucer.
It's no thicker than a potato chip and sparkles under the
fluorescent light. "That's solid diamond," he says. "You could use
something like this as a window in a space shuttle."

The military is interested in lab-grown diamonds for a number of
applications, only some of which Butler is willing to discuss, such
as lasers and wearproof coatings. Because diamond itself doesn't
react with other substances, scientists think it's ideal for a
biological weapons detector, in which a tiny, electrically charged
diamond plate would hold receptor molecules that recognize
particular pathogens such as anthrax; when a pathogen binds to a
receptor, a signal is triggered. Butler, working with University of
Wisconsin chemist Robert Hamers, has produced a prototype of the
sensor that can detect DNA or proteins.

The largest single-crystal diamond ever grown in a lab is about .7
inches by .2 inches by .2 inches, or 15 carats. The stone isn't
under military guard or at a hidden location. It's in a room crowded
with gauges and microscopes, along with the odd bicycle and congo
drum, on a leafy campus surrounded by Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek
Park. Russell Hemley, director of the Carnegie Institution's
Geophysical Lab, started working on growing diamonds with CVD in
1995. He pulls a diamond out of his khakis. It would be hard to
mistake this diamond for anything sold at Tiffany. The rectangular
stone looks like a thick piece of tinted glass.

Hemley and other scientists are using laboratory and natural
diamonds to understand what happens to materials under very high
pressure--the type of pressure at the center of the earth. He
conducts experiments by squeezing materials in a "diamond anvil
cell," essentially a powerful vise with diamonds at both tips.

A few years ago, Hemley created one of the hardest known diamonds.
He grew it in the lab and then placed it in a high-pressure,
high-temperature furnace that changed the diamond's atomic
structure. The stone was so hard that it broke Hemley's hardness
gauge, which was itself made out of diamond. Using the super-hard
diamond anvil, Hemley has increased the amount of pressure he can
exert on materials in his experiments up to four million to five
million times greater than atmospheric pressure at sea level.

"Under extreme conditions, the behavior of materials is very
different," he explains. "Pressure makes all materials undergo
transformations. It makes gases into superconductors, makes novel
super-hard materials. You can change the nature of elements."

He discovered, for instance, that under pressure, hydrogen gas
merges with iron crystals. Hemley believes that hydrogen might make
up a portion of the earth's core, which is otherwise composed
largely of iron and nickel. He has been studying the hydrogen-iron
substance to understand the temperature and composition of the
center of our planet.

In another surprising discovery, Hemley found that two common
bacteria, including the intestinal microorganism E. coli, can
survive under colossal pressure. He and his colleagues placed the
organisms in water and then ratcheted up the diamond anvil. The
water solution soon turned into a dense form of ice. Nevertheless,
about 1 percent of the bacteria survived, with some bacteria even
skittering around. Hemley says the research is more evidence that
life as we know it may be capable of existing on other planets
within our solar system, such as under the crust of one of Jupiter's
moons. "Can there be life in deep oceans in outer satellites like
Europa?" asks Hemley. "I don't know, but we might want to be
looking."

Hemley hopes to soon surpass his own record for the largest
lab-grown diamond crystal. It's not clear who has produced the
largest multiple-crystal diamond, but a company called Element Six
can make wafers up to eight inches wide. The largest mined diamond,
called the Cullinan diamond, was more than 3,000 carats--about 1.3
pounds--before being cut. The largest diamond so far found in the
universe is the size of a small planet and located 50 light-years
away in the constellation Centaurus. Astronomers with the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered the gigantic
stone a few years ago, and they believe the 2,500-mile-wide diamond
once served as the heart of a star. It's ten billion trillion
trillion carats. The astronomers named it Lucy in honor of the
Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."

Natural diamonds aren't particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000
pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity
because everyone thinks it's a precious commodity, the geological
equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol
of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.

Credit for the modern cult of the diamond goes primarily to South
Africa-based De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer. Before
the 1940s, diamond rings were rarely given as engagement gifts. But
De Beers' marketing campaigns established the idea that the gems are
the supreme token of love and affection. Their "A Diamond Is
Forever" slogan, first deployed in 1948, is considered one of the
most successful advertising campaigns of all time. Through a near
total control of supply, De Beers held almost complete power over
the diamond market for decades, carefully hoarding the gemstones to
keep prices--and profits--high. While the company has lost some of
its power to competitors in Canada and Australia over the past few
years, it still controls almost two-thirds of the world's rough
diamonds.

Diamond growers are proud of the challenge they pose to De Beers and
the rest of the natural diamond industry. Apollo's slogan is "A
Diamond Is for Everyone." So far, though, Apollo's colorless gems
cost about the same as natural stones, while the company's pink,
blue, champagne, mocha and brown diamonds retail for about 15
percent less than natural stones with such colors, which are very
rare and more expensive than white diamonds. Meanwhile, consumers
may well be receptive to high-quality, laboratory-produced diamonds.
Like most open-pit mines, diamond mines cause erosion, water
pollution and habitat loss for wildlife. Even more troubling,
African warlords have used diamond caches to buy arms and fund rebel
movements, as dramatized in the 2006 movie Blood Diamond. Actor
Terrence Howard wears a diamond lapel pin with Apollo stones. He
told reporters, "Nobody was harmed in the process of making it."

Half a dozen other companies have begun to manufacture gem-quality
diamonds using not CVD but a process that more closely mimics the
way diamonds are created in the earth. The method--basically an
improvement on how scientists have been making diamonds since the
1950s--requires heat of more than 2,000 degrees and pressure 50
times greater than that at the surface of the earth. (Both the heat
and pressure are more than what CVD requires.) The washing
machine-size devices can't produce stones much larger than six
carats. These HPHT diamonds--the initials stand for high pressure
and high temperature--have more nitrogen in them than CVD diamonds
do; the nitrogen turns the diamonds amber-colored. For now, though,
the process has a significant benefit over CVD: it's less expensive.
While a natural, one-carat amber-colored diamond might retail for
$20,000 or more, the Florida-based manufacturer Gemesis sells a
one-carat stone for about $6,000. But no one, Gemesis included,
wants to sell diamonds too cheaply lest the market for them
collapse.

Gemologists plying everyday tools can seldom distinguish between
natural and lab-grown diamonds. (Fake diamonds such as cubic
zirconia are easy to spot.) De Beers sells two machines that detect
either chemical or structural characteristics that sometimes vary
between the two types of stones, but neither machine can tell the
difference all the time. Another way to identify a lab-produced
diamond is to cool the stone in liquid nitrogen and then fire a
laser at it and examine how the light passes through the stone. But
equipment is expensive and the process can take hours.

Diamonds from Apollo and Gemesis, the two largest manufacturers, are
marked with a laser-inscribed insignia visible with a jeweler's
loupe. Last year, the Gemological Institute of America, an industry
research group, began to grade lab-grown stones according to carat,
cut, color and clarity--just as it does for natural stones--and it
provides a certificate for each gem that identifies it as lab grown.

The diamond-mining companies have been fighting back, arguing that
all that glitters is not diamond. De Beers' ads and its Web sites
insist that diamonds should be natural, unprocessed and millions of
years old. "Diamonds are rare and special things with an inherent
value that does not exist in factory-made synthetics," says
spokeswoman Lynette Gould. "When people want to celebrate a unique
relationship they want a unique diamond, not a three-day-old
factory-made stone." (De Beers does have an investment in Element
Six, the company that makes thin industrial diamonds.)

The Jewelers Vigilance Committee (JVC), a trade group, has been
lobbying the Federal Trade Commission to prevent diamond
manufacturers from calling their stones "cultured," a term used for
most of the pearls sold today. (People in the mined diamond business
use less-flattering terms such as "synthetic.") The JVC filed a
petition with the agency in 2006, claiming that consumers are often
confused by the nomenclature surrounding lab-grown diamonds.