Diamonds created in lab with pressure equivalent to 640 elephants on shoe tip

Team Udayavani, Nov 21, 2020, 6:02 PM IST

An international team of scientists in Australia made two types of diamonds within minutes inside a lab at normal room temperatures by applying high pressures on carbon.

The pressure was equivalent to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe. “We allow carbon to also experience something called ‘shear’, which is like a twisting force,” a scientist said.

According to India times, Once developed, co-lead researcher Professor Dougal McCulloch and his team at RMIT used advanced electron microscopy techniques to capture “solid and intact slices” from the experimental samples. Using this, the team was able to create snapshots of how the two types of diamonds formed.

“Our pictures showed that the regular diamonds only form in the middle of these Lonsdaleite veins under this new method developed by our cross-institutional team,” McCulloch said.