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A cut and polished diamond produced in the lab. Photo: WD Lab Grown Diamonds

How lab-grown diamonds could bring down the traditional market

Nearly a dozen companies worldwide are creating diamonds that are all but indistinguishable from mined stones, a worrying thought for gem dealers

At a drab office park in a Washington suburb, in an unmarked building’s windowless lab, Yarden Tsach is growing diamonds. Not rhinestones or cubic zirconia, but real diamonds. In a matter of eight weeks, inside a gas-filled chamber, he replicates a process that usually takes from one billion to 3.3 billion years at a depth between 140 and 190 kilometres in the Earth’s mantle. Carbon atom by carbon atom, he creates nature’s hardest and – if decades of advertisements are to be believed – most romantic stone.

No outsiders get to witness this genesis, though. WD Lab Grown Diamonds, where Tsach is chief technology officer, guards its approach as zealously as its address. These are the measures a company takes when it’s a target – of fierce competitors, potential jewel thieves and a traditional industry that would very much like it to go away.

“Everything is after us,” Tsach says.

WD Lab Grown Diamonds chief technology officer Yarden Tsach (left) reviews diamond images with founder and chairman Clive Hill. Photo: Washington Diamonds

Until the middle of the past century, all the world’s diamonds originated in the Earth’s mantle. Tremendous temperatures and pressures force carbon atoms to link up in a flawless, three-dimensional lattice that is incredibly strong and equally effective at bending and bouncing light. The result is a crystal – a gem in the rough.

Yet getting those stones up to the surface has required an enormous – and sometimes bloody – effort. The environmental impact of diamond mining is so sprawling that it can be seen from space. The humanitarian cost of some gems is also staggering: children forced to work in mines, “blood diamonds” sold to finance wars.

Traditional diamond producers say only a small fraction of diamonds are suspect these days because of steps they’ve taken to ensure that mines are socially and environmentally responsible. They push back against the appeal of lab-grown stones, suggesting the man-made versions aren’t on a par with those dug out of the ground. The most recent ad campaign from the Diamond Producers Association, which features hipster couples frolicking amid gorgeous nature scenes, is called “Real is Rare”.

Their argument is unspoken but clear: no one should propose to a sweetheart with a gem that was made in some drab office park.

Tsach shakes his head and holds up one of his company’s products. It catches the fluorescent light, casting rainbows on the walls.

“This was grown here next to Washington, DC, by people with health insurance and sick days and vacation days,” he says. “Is it a real diamond? A person can make up his own mind.”

Scientists have been creating diamonds since the 1950s, mimicking the conditions deep within the Earth by heating carbon to extreme temperatures while squeezing it in a hydraulic press. But it took them several decades more to cultivate large gem-quality stones. These were still not as large or as clear as the best traditional diamonds, and most were coloured yellow or brown from the nitrogen required to stabilise the process. Still, the traditional diamond companies were on edge.

“Unless they can be detected,” a Belgian diamond dealer told Wired in 2003, “these stones will bankrupt the industry.”

Philip Martineau, head of physics at the De Beers Research Centre, holds a molecular model of a diamond. Photo: Bloomberg

Today, nearly a dozen companies worldwide produce diamonds that are all but indistinguishable from mined stones – good enough for any engagement ring. Four more companies focus solely on diamonds for use in factories and research labs. One of the latter, Element Six, is run by the famous diamond-mining company De Beers.

“The industry is as viable as it’s ever been,” says Rob Bates of the diamond trade publication JCK.

WDLG Diamond relies on a technique developed by scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science. It starts with a tiny sliver of diamond that acts as a substrate on which the new stone can grow. This “seed” is placed inside an airless chamber, which is pumped full of hydrogen and methane that become plasma, a hot, ionised gas.

The now highly charged carbon atoms from the methane are attracted to the seed at the bottom of the chamber and begin to forge the super-strong bonds that characterise a diamond. As each new atom is added, it attaches to the diamond’s lattice structure, falling into place like a piece of a puzzle.

“The details are still not completely understood,” says Russell Hemley, who directed Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory in the late 1990s. “But the presence of hydrogen biases the deposition of carbon as diamond rather than graphite. That’s how you can grow a diamond outside of what’s known as its stability region” – meaning the extreme pressures and temperatures found in the Earth’s mantle.

“Real is rare.”

When a stone reaches a certain size, Tsach’s team puts it in a second chamber and zaps it with a laser to excise the seed diamond and condition the new gem’s surface. What emerges from this process is a cube, about the size of a thumbnail. It’s dark from the thin film of graphite (the other form of pure carbon) produced by the laser-cutting process. It’s also distinctly unimpressive and looks like a bit of plastic.

Then off it goes, to be cut by a commercial polisher. Tsach chooses a pattern using special software that helps him maximise the number of gems the company can get from the stone while avoiding any of its imperfections. This process is like Tetris, if Tetris pieces were worth thousands of dollars.

The last stop is the International Gemological Institute, where the gem is graded and certified. Per federal US regulation, it’s also inscribed with “Laboratory grown in the USA” and a serial number to distinguish it from a mined diamond. The label is microscopically small, but growers wish they could ditch the clinical-sounding term. It’s not exactly swoon-worthy.

After eight weeks of “growing”, diamonds are given an initial cut by lasers at WD Lab Grown Diamonds. Photo: The Washington Post

Sales of lab-grown stones make up about 1 per cent of the global commercial diamond market, but a 2016 report from investment firm Morgan Stanley suggests that could jump to 7.5 per cent by the end of the decade. In one unlikely scenario, analysts say, lab diamonds might become so ubiquitous that the entire traditional market collapses.

After all, that market depends on sentiment and scarcity. The combination is what made De Beers’ famous “a diamond is forever” campaign so potent. It turned diamonds into the ultimate symbol of eternal love, stones that were to be treasured and never resold. The strategy has helped to ensure diamond companies control supply.

But lab-grown jewels shatter the illusion. They can be made on demand, in a matter of weeks, and they cost an estimated 10 per cent to 40 per cent less than a gem that comes out of the ground. Technology being what it is, it’s likely they’ll get even cheaper.

So what happens then? Will a diamond be just another shiny rock?

“A diamond is an extraordinary material,” Hemley says, indignant. He notes the stone’s strength, optical qualities and resilience. “Its intrinsic properties are remarkable.”

Wearing it on your finger is just about the least interesting thing you can do with a diamond. The stones are one of nature’s best heat conductors and electrical insulators; when used in the production of semiconductors, they keep the silicon from overheating. They’re also used to make drill bits, solar panels and high-power lasers.

Diamond mining is a costly and sometimes bloody operation. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

One day, tiny diamond nanoparticles might even help deliver medicine to cells struck by cancer.

Lab-grown gems extend the possibilities much further – allowing scientists to explore questions about the cosmos. Hemley, who is now a professor at George Washington University, is working with WDLG Diamonds to develop better stones for instruments called diamond anvil cells. By squeezing together two diamonds – the only material capable of withstanding such pressures – scientists can simulate the conditions found inside planets. They can compress the microbes that dwell in the Earth’s crust to understand how they resist the crushing weight of the rock above them. They can model the behaviour of gases that endure the high pressure of gas planets such as Saturn and Jupiter.

And they can push materials to such extremes that they take on new properties. Just last month, Harvard physicists claimed that they’d used a diamond vise to turn hydrogen into a metal – a step towards developing a new type of superconductor.

Diamonds’ transparency is vital in these experiments. It allows researchers to send beams of light, from X-ray to infrared, through the anvil cell to probe the material inside. Reinhard Boehler, a scientist at Carnegie and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, uses neutron beams to probe elements such as carbon and hydrogen at very high pressures. The task requires diamonds that are perfect and large, so they can only come from a lab. Traditional diamonds often contain flaws, and those of any significant size are far too expensive – especially because Boehler’s lab breaks so many of its anvils.

He says with a chuckle: “Diamonds, for us, are not forever.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: carbon copies
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