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Discover how synthetic diamonds are taking over the jewelry industry: more beautiful, cheaper and purer than natural ones!
Laboratory-made diamonds are, from a physical and chemical point of view, identical to natural diamonds. There is not the slightest difference between them. Both are minerals with a three-dimensional crystalline structure of carbon atoms. The proximity of their atoms and the strength of the bonds that hold them together make diamonds the hardest mineral known, understanding hardness as their resistance to being scratched. Mohs scale, the diamond has a rating of 10.
Scientists first managed to make diamonds in the laboratory in the 50s, and they did so in a very ingenious way: recreating the conditions that give rise to their formation in nature. The problem is that these first synthetic diamonds were small and very impure, so their quality was overwhelmingly inferior to that of natural diamonds. However, seven decades have passed since then and, as expected, materials engineering has advanced greatly.
So much so, in fact, that diamonds currently manufactured in the best laboratories are cheaper than natural ones. And, what’s more, they have superior optical, chemical, physical and electrical properties. But that’s not all. Production techniques have advanced so much in the last decade that it is now possible to manufacture them on a large scale, which makes them highly valued by the jewelry industry. It seems incredible that we have reached a level of development where man is able to produce diamonds that are better than nature itself.
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Blessed chemical vapor deposition
In late 1954, American chemist Howard Tracy Hall managed to synthesize diamonds for the first time in a laboratory, although the technique he used was radically different from the most advanced ones used today. In short, what he did was to manufacture a pressure chamber designed by him and his team at General Electric with the aim of subjecting a mixture of iron sulfide and powdered coal to no less than a pressure close to 100.000 atmospheres and a temperature of 1.600 degrees Celsius. Not bad if we don't take into account the modest resources of the time.
Interestingly, the technique currently used to manufacture diamonds is not directly inspired by nature. At least, not literally. This process is known as chemical vapor deposition and is also used to produce other materials and chemical elements, such as borophene or beryllium. The strategy is relatively simple: a solid material is deposited on a surface using vapor in which a chemical reaction occurs. In the case of manufacturing diamonds, the first step is to heat the carbon to the temperature necessary to evaporate it and transform it into a gas of isolated atoms.
Then, it is necessary to induce its crystallization so that, as it cools, it adopts the structure of a diamond. The first scientist to manufacture diamonds using the chemical vapor deposition technique was the American William Eversole, in 1958. From there, the Soviet Union, Europe and Japan joined the United States and began their own research to refine the chemical vapor deposition method. They wanted to increase the quality of diamonds that could be produced in the laboratory. This competition between the scientific powers of the time is, in fact, what brought us to where we are today.
Chemical vapor deposition techniques used today are far more advanced and refined than those employed in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, they allow scientists to give the diamonds they produce specific physical, mechanical, optical and thermal characteristics by manipulating the temperature, pressure and duration of the reaction, as well as introducing some controlled impurities into the reactive gas.
The result of this technology is what we anticipated in the title of this article: the diamonds that can be manufactured in a laboratory today are purer, more beautiful and cheaper than natural ones. And, of course, the jewelry industry benefits enormously, since the development of this technology has put an end to scarcity once and for all.
