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Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.
An apocryphal story holds that in response to an appeal to spare his life so that he could continue his experiments, the Revolutionary judge Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal declared that ‘The Republic needs neither scholars nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be impeded’. Manufacturers can engineer chemical vapor deposition diamonds to precise physical, mechanical, thermal, and optical specifications by varying the temperature, pressure, and duration of the reaction and by adding desired impurities to the reactant gas. This means diamond can handle higher temperatures and voltages than conventional semiconductors, making it useful not only in devices that operate in extreme conditions (such as engines, radio towers, drilling equipment, spacecrafts, solar panels, and the electricity grid) but also for increasing microchip performance more generally.
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