Australian scientists claim that diamonds can be made in minutes at room temperature
Reference News Network reported on November 23 that the US media said that diamonds are long-lasting, but this does not mean that they must take billions of years to form. Scientists say they shortened this process to just a few minutes – and it was at room temperature.
According to a report on the CNN website on November 19, the carbon deep in the earth usually takes billions of years to form diamonds under high temperature and pressure conditions-this is what makes them coveted.
Now, Australian scientists say they have shortened this process to just a few minutes-and at room temperature.
An international team of researchers led by the Australian National University and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology said on the 18th that they used high pressure (equivalent to 640 African elephants to balance on the toe of a ballet shoe) at room temperature to create two kinds of diamond.
The researchers said they were able to make two diamonds with different structures: one with a structure similar to a regular diamond set in jewelry, and the other called a Lancedale diamond, the latter naturally occurring at the site of the meteorite impact, and Harder than most diamonds.
According to reports, man-made diamonds themselves are not new. Since the middle of the 20th century, humans have been manufacturing artificial diamonds in laboratories in order to obtain cheaper, environmentally-friendly and ethical diamonds. But researchers are excited about making diamonds at room temperature, especially the harder Lansdale diamonds, which can be used to cut “super hard” materials in mining plants.
“Making more of these rare but super useful diamonds is the long-term goal of this work,” said Huang Xingshuo, a scholar at the Australian National University who worked on the project. “For the first time, our laboratory produced these two types at room temperature. Diamonds are very exciting.”
According to reports, laboratory-made diamonds are usually formed from carbon at high temperatures
Jody Bradby, a professor of physics at the Australian National University, said that in order to form diamonds, the researchers applied tremendous pressure to create a “twisting force or sliding force,” which they believed would cause the carbon atoms to move to the proper position.
“Usually, carbon is subjected to high pressure and high temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Celsius about 150 kilometers from the surface, and it takes billions of years to form natural diamonds,” Bradby said. “The turning point of the story is how we apply pressure.”
The report also said that Dougle McCulloch, a physics professor at RMIT University who co-led the research, and his team later used advanced electron microscopy techniques to slice the experimental samples to better understand how they were. Forming.
When the research team studied the samples, they found that both ordinary diamonds and Lancedale diamonds run through the veins. McCulloch said: “It’s amazing to see these small rivers of Lancedale diamonds and ordinary diamonds for the first time. It really helps us understand how they are formed.”
Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA also participated in the study.
