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Silicon Valley Is On A Quest To Grow The Perfect Diamond

For centuries, people have gone to great lengths and extraordinary costs - from the baked Namib Desert to the ice-locked Canadian tundra - to pull diamonds out of the Earth, endlessly searching for the dead volcanoes...

From: wired.co.ukDate: 2017-08-31 03:21:55Views: 777

For centuries, people have gone to great lengths and extraordinary costs - from the baked Namib Desert to the ice-locked Canadian tundra - to pull diamonds out of the Earth, endlessly searching for the dead volcanoes that thrust those transmuted carbon relics from the planet's core and into a special place in our imaginations.

But one no longer has to go so far, or get very dirty, to find diamond. In a bright, well-lit, key-carded clean room not far from San Francisco International Airport, on a non-descript street of low-rise logistics and light-industrial warehouses, a diamond is being created before my eyes. Well, not quite before my eyes - the light would be too intense - but inside a reactor, which doesn't look much different to racks of data-centre equipment, albeit fed by any number of hoses carrying gasses and water.

Behind the edge of a piece of glass, an eerie, spectral blue light spills out. "The kind of glow you see is the optical emission from the actual growth process occurring," says Jeremy Scholz, the tall, baritone-voiced chief technical officer and co-founder of Diamond Foundry, the startup producing what are known as lab-created, or cultivated, diamonds. Prior to starting the reaction, Scholz had turned off computer screens and advised me that mobile phones were not allowed. "As we energise that carbon-containing gas, it lights up just like a fluorescent light does."

The process occurring inside that chamber - the size of a bowling ball, which, with its round, bolted porthole window looks rather like a Jules Verne submarine - is known as chemical vapour deposition, or CVD. In simplest terms, as Scholz describes it, it's the "act of growing a solid material from a gas".

Inside, a 12mm-thick plate, or "diamond seed", will be exposed to, among other things, hydrogen and gaseous forms of carbon, which are energised by a high-intensity magnetic discharge. This is enough power to send an 18-wheel lorry down the motorway, with temperatures hotter than the Sun. The diamond grows, in a process not vastly dissimilar - in the broadest scientific sense anyway - from the "grow a crystal" kits sold in toy shops.

"They're not synthetic diamonds, like synthetic fibre. They're real diamonds. They're grown diamonds"

Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Diamond Foundry

The result of this process - one of Diamond Foundry's rough stones - is placed in front of me on a conference-room table. "They're not synthetic diamonds, like synthetic fibre, where you are talking about a different material than real fibre," says Martin Roscheisen, the company's CEO. "They're real diamonds. They're grown diamonds." Wrinkling his forehead behind translucent eyewear as he listens to a question, I catch a resemblance to the late comedian Robin Williams - by way of Bavaria.

He hands me an eyeglass called a loupe. I take a pair of tweezers and fumble with the rough stone, which feels almost comically unsubstantial in light of its theoretical value. I peer into it through the lens. Eventually, the diamond's light - a bit grainy, a bit yellow-seeming - swims into focus. I am hardly moved - to me it just looks like one of the rocks in my daughter's geology kit. But once this stone is cut and polished - by cutters who previously worked with mined diamonds - achieving its characteristic brilliance, neither I, nor most anyone else, would be able to tell this was man-made.

Roscheisen, a German native with Austrian citizenship, studied computer science and engineering at Stanford University in the 90s, where he was classmates and friends with future Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. He was a serial entrepreneur in a string of unicorns including eGroups, TradingDynamics, and FindLaw before co-founding Nanosolar, the company that brought ultra-thin (some ten times less than conventional technology), affordable solar panels to market.

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