Scientists make insta-bling at room temperature

ANU PhD scholar Xingshuo Huang holds the diamond anvil that the team used to make the diamonds in the lab. Credit: Jamie Kidston, ANU - An international team of scientists has defied nature to make diamonds in minutes in a laboratory at room temperature - a process that normally requires billions of years, huge amounts of pressure and super-hot temperatures. The team, led by The Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University, made two types of diamonds: the kind found on an engagement ring and another type of diamond called Lonsdaleite, which is found in nature at the site of meteorite impacts such as Canyon Diablo in the US. One of the lead researchers, ANU Professor Jodie Bradby, said their breakthrough shows that Superman may have had a similar trick up his sleeve when he crushed coal into diamond , without using his heat ray. "Natural diamonds are usually formed over billions of years, about 150 kilometres deep in the Earth where there are high pressures and temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius," said Professor Bradby from the ANU Research School of Physics. The team, including former ANU PhD scholar Tom Shiell now at Carnegie Institution for Science, previously created Lonsdaleite in the lab only at high temperatures. This new unexpected discovery shows both Lonsdaleite and regular diamond can also form at normal room temperatures by just applying high pressures - equivalent to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe.