Scientists can make perfectly good diamonds in just 150 minutes

The process of naturally making a diamond takes billions of years, as minerals under extreme pressure deep beneath the Earth's surface get mashed together to form the most popular gemstone made entirely out of carbon.

2

Waiting for new diamonds to form simply isn't feasible, which is why researchers have turned to synthetic diamond manufacturing to keep up with the global demand for diamonds. It still typically takes a few weeks to synthetically produce a diamond, but a team of researchers with an innovative approach to the problem has shaved a few weeks down to just a few minutes. Researchers from the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea have devised a new method that can also be scaled up for mass production.

The researchers have proposed a mix of liquid metals: gallium, iron, nickel, and silicon, which are enclosed in a custom-made vacuum system that's within a graphite casing. This casing is then rapidly heated and cooled while being exposed to methane and hydrogen, creating the pressure needed to make a diamond. How does it work? These conditions force the carbon atoms within the methane to move into the liquid metal, creating little diamond "seeds" within the liquid.

The team writes that after 15 minutes tiny diamond crystals begin to extrude from the liquid metal, and after 2.5 hours there was a diamond film. While the scale of this is currently quite small the teams says its confident in making changes to the design process to not only produce more diamonds, but also increase the surface area of which the diamonds are grown.

"We suggest that straightforward modifications could enable growing diamond over a very large area by using a larger surface or interface, by configuring heating elements to achieve a much larger potential growth region and by distributing carbon to the diamond growth region in some new ways," write the researchers

"The general approach of using liquid metals could accelerate and advance the growth of diamonds on a variety of surfaces, and perhaps facilitate the growth of diamond on small diamond (seed) particles," write the researchers