• Question: Have you ever experimented with diamonds

    Asked by anon-232903 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 18 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Anna Kalorkoti

      Anna Kalorkoti answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      I’ve never experimented on diamonds, but I have used diamonds as a tool in the lab! Because diamonds are the hardest thing that exists in nature, nothing else natural will scratch them, but they will scratch anything else. So if we have a material that’s pretty hard, and we want to compare its hardness to other materials, one of the things we can do is press a diamond into its surface and see how big a dent it makes. (To make sure we can compare different materials, we use the same size & shape of diamond every time, and press it into the surface with the same force). Or if we want to look at some metal under the microscope, and we want it to have a nice smooth surface so we get a good microscope picture, we polish it using diamond paste. This contains millions of tiny diamonds, each smaller than the width of a single human hair, which was pretty mind-boggling to me the first time I got to use the stuff!

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      Nope, I work on biology. So I don’t use diamonds in my work 🙂

    • Photo: Samantha Firth

      Samantha Firth answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      No, I haven’t but my office sits next door to the Diamond Light Source! It’s the UK’s national synchrotron. It works like a giant microscope – it harnesses the power of electrons to produce bright light that scientists can use to study anything from fossils to viruses and vaccines! 💎💎💎

    • Photo: Rebecca Shaw

      Rebecca Shaw answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      So I’ve never done experiments with diamonds, but I do use diamonds in my work!
      We use diamond blades to cut really really fine sections of bones, cells and tissue to do further analysis on. They are really useful, but super expensive! I got to use one the other week and I was so scared I would drop it!

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