Natural diamonds need to be “tortured” by high-pressure and high-temperature environments deep in the earth for billions of years to form. Grown diamonds that take artificial shortcuts are faster, but they usually still take several weeks to be intensely squeezed. Now, a new method based on a mixture of liquid metals can create artificial diamonds in just 150 minutes, without the need for high-pressure work.
The most common method for synthetic diamonds is HPHT (high-pressure and high-temperature growth) technology, which forms diamonds by dissolving carbon in liquid metal at a pressure of 5 GPa and a temperature of 1,400°C, and the size is always limited to about 1 cubic centimeter.
However, according to a paper published in the journal Nature by the Korean Institute of Basic Science (IBS), a new method allows artificial diamonds to be generated at atmospheric pressure and at a lower temperature than HPHT technology, requiring only 1,025°C.
The team used a homemade cold wall vacuum system (RSR-S) to grow diamonds. When a liquid metal alloy composed of gallium, nickel, iron, and silicon (atomic percentages 77.75, 11.00, 11.00, 0.25) is exposed to a methane/hydrogen mixture at 1 atmosphere, rapid heating and then cooling causes the methane carbon atoms to diffuse into the molten metal, In just 15 minutes, diamond particles were extruded from the liquid metal; within 150 minutes, a diamond film formed on the subsurface of the liquid metal alloy.
The diamond market is not only for luxury goods, they are also used by scientists for various experiments, such as inducing magnetic fields and searching for new subatomic particles. The research team has found that high-quality diamonds can be grown by replacing nickel with cobalt, or replacing gallium with a gallium-indium mixture. Their next step is to expand the potential growth area on the surface of liquid metal and gold to try to produce artificial diamonds on a large scale. If this new technology Realizing the potential, creating artificial diamonds will become faster and easier in the future.
(Source of first image: generated by AI)
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