Scientists Create Diamonds at Room Temp in Minutes

Typically, Diamonds are formed after carbon gets crushed and heated away under the earth's surface over billions of years, which is what makes them so desirable.

Now, scientists in Australia say they have sped up this process in just minutes, and at room temperature.

An international team of researchers, led by the Australian National University and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said on Wednesday that they were able to manufacture two types of diamonds at room temperature using high pressure equivalent to "balancing 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe."

Industrial diamonds are not new, and they have already been manufactured in laboratories since the 1940s, to find stones at a lower cost, in ethical and environmentally friendly ways.

But researchers were excited by their success in making two types of diamonds at room temperature, particularly the harder "Lonsdaleite" diamonds, which have the potential to be used to cut "superhard" materials at mining sites.

Sheng Huang, a researcher at the Australian National University said that "making more diamonds of this kind is the long term goal of our work," adding that "The ability to make two types of diamonds at room temperature was an exciting thing that was achieved for the first time in our lab."

Diamonds grown in the laboratory are usually made with carbon that is exposed to extremely high temperatures.

In order to form the diamond, the researchers applied great pressure to create the "twisting or sliding force" that they believe caused the carbon atoms to shift into place," said Judy Bradby, a professor of physics at Australian National University.

"Normally, natural diamonds are formed over billions of years, at a depth of about 150 kilometres underground, where there are high pressures and temperatures above 1000 degrees Celsius," Bradby said, noting that "it is all about how pressure is applied."

On his part, Dougal McCulloch, a professor of physics at RMIT who co-led the research, and his team then used advanced electron microscopy techniques to take slices from experimental samples to better understand how they were made.

After studying the samples, the team found "veins of regular and" Lonsdaleite ones" running through them.

"Seeing these little" rivers "of" Lonsdaleite ones" and regular ones for the first time," McCulloch said. "This is amazing and helps us understand how they formed."

Researchers from the University of Sydney, as well as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA, participated in the research.