The unique atomic structure of diamonds will likely make them a vital cog in the next generation of high technology, bionic eyes to new lasers and tamper proof communications.
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In the 1953 movie, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, an ageing aristocrat called Sir Francis Beekman gave away his wife’s diamond tiara to gain the affections of Marilyn Monroe’s character Lorelei Lee. The movie’s hit song was "Diamonds are a girl’s best friend".
But nearly 60 years later, developments in the fields of physics and nanotechnology are proving that diamonds can be used for far more interesting things than plain old seduction.
In fact this physicist’s ‘new best friend’ is popping up all over the show and playing a starring role in new research into bionic eyes, delicate new lasers, tamper proof communication and prosthetic knees. According to David Awschalom, a quantum physicist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, we’re on the verge of 'the Diamond Age'.
It’s long been recognised that diamond is the hardest natural substance known. The Ancient Greeks called it ‘adamas’, which means ‘unconquerable and indestructible’.
Less well known is that diamond conducts heat faster than any other material, making it ideal for drawing waste heat away from energy intensive electronics.
Diamond is also virtually transparent through a wide spectrum of wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to the far infrared. Light absorption only tends to occur because of impurities of boron or nitrogen in the tight crystal lattice of carbon atoms that makes up diamond.
Natural diamonds were formed millions of years ago in hot, high pressure environments more than 100 km beneath the Earth’s surface. But nowadays, diamonds can be grown in the lab in a process called chemical vapour deposition (CVD), which involves ionising a mixture of gases including methane.
As carbon is freed from the methane, it forms diamond on a specially prepared base material heated to 800°C. It’s also possible to ‘dope’ the diamond by adding elements such as boron or nitrogen to the recipe, in order to take advantage of its unique properties.
In fact, some of the most exciting opportunities in quantum technology today rely on these dopants within diamond. One such impurity occurs when a single nitrogen atom gets caught in the lattice of carbon atoms. It bonds with the diamond in such a way that an electron is left 'free'.
David Awschalom’s research focuses on manipulating the ‘spin’ of these free electrons with microwaves in a new field of research termed ‘spintronics’. Spin can be thought of as a magnetic property of elementary particles on a quantum level and electrons usually exist as spin up or spin down.
This is a natural fit with the concept of the ones and zeroes of the binary code on which modern digital computing is based. But due to the baffling rules of quantum mechanics, microwaves can be used to put the electron somewhere between spin up and spin down, as a combination of any number of different states.
The electron could thus become a way to store massive amounts of data, and it could also form the basis for quantum computers, which would use quantum effects to manipulate the data. This is predicted to greatly increase the speed of computers, because of the vast number of calculations that could occur on a single electron.
