It still amazes me that the rare shiny rocks humanity has appreciated for thousands of years also turn out to have amazing properties even compared to the synthetic materials we are now capable of creating. It's still the hardest material we have measured. It is the best thermal conductor, even though it's an electrical insulator.
> even compared to the synthetic materials we are now capable of creating<p>Aren't like almost all commercially used diamonds these days synthetic as well? As far as I can tell, other than just for the sake of them being "natural" or for having weird impurities that add color to them (read as: subjectively better to some people), no one wants/needs natural ones anymore.
I've thought about this at times. How convenient that things seem to work out that way! Though I wonder if it's more just a bias. All the very impressive things you can make from the abundant materials have already been made. Like, say, all of life?
Diamonds are crystals, like silicon
Nothing wrong with liking shiny rocks, but they aren't that rare and we can generally produce them. Materials have properties. Understanding the properties generally gives us leverage to use them in our own benefit.
It is a very good thermal conductor, but not the best. At low temperatures, copper is better. At very low temperatures, helium is much better.<p>Superfluid helium's maximum thermal conductivity is roughly 100x diamond's maximum!
They make nice (and expensive) tweeters, too.<p><a href="https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/diamond-dome-tweeters/seas-excel-t29d001-diamond-dome-tweeter-matched-pair/" rel="nofollow">https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/diamond-dome-tweeters/...</a>
Neat! At around the temperature of liquid water, it's still about five times as good as copper.
>Superfluid helium's maximum thermal conductivity is roughly 100x diamond's maximum!<p>Never thought about this before. Would that mean that heat propagates much more quickly? Possibly even approaching the speed of sound of the material?
Slide 12. Pretty much yeah.
<a href="https://indico.cern.ch/event/1541024/attachments/3055157/5401406/17_He%20II%20part%201%20Heat%20transfer%20and%20effects.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://indico.cern.ch/event/1541024/attachments/3055157/540...</a><p>You can kind of isolate the different vibrational modes and their corresponding energy transmission. "Phonons" are basically sound waves (the particle analogue), labeled in figure 2:
<a href="https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2019/07/12/dcs_2019.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2019/07/12/dcs_2...</a>
Asionometry video on the topic: Why Diamond Transistors Are So Hard (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLmd5vL0zmk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLmd5vL0zmk</a>)
Forget the transistor for now: that's many years/decades away.<p>Much more likely to actually get to market is diamond as the heat dissipating substrate.
Anyone else reminded of that old Crighton book, Congo?
>single-crystal diamond wafer<p>Can you hear the sound of DeBeers' execs melting down? I intend to play it as a white noise while I sleep.
Diamonds are incredibly useful,<p>And logical, now that we can produce them easily enough.<p>This, is one of many uses of the rocks.
But we need to move to photonics.
Why do people still think they need to mess with scrolling on their websites?
Normally, I am the first to complain about broken websites, but it looks fine for me on Firefox on a laptop. Scrolling works normal using up-down arrow keys and dragging on the side scrollbar. There is an unnecessary effect with the 3D diagram, but it doesn't interfere with the site. How are you viewing it?
I know; at least very little else breaks on the site if you just kill scripts in ublock origin.
So... how long does the hydrogen gas layer last before it all seeps out?
I'd be surprise if it gets even 1% of SI world dominance after 5 years
Isn't the power consumption needed to create pure/no-blemish lab diamonds so great, that this wouldn't be feasible to scale.
Lab diamonds are used in huge quantities (ie. By the bucketful ) for making cutting tools like saws and drill bits.<p>I believe the main difficulty is making <i>large</i> and <i>pure</i> diamonds. Making small low purity diamonds is cheap and easy to scale.
massive crushing pressure is not the only way to create diamond particles.
I still don't know how to even make a silicon transistor.
And no, blog writers, it is not heralding "The Diamond Age".
I don't know... LLMs, drones, culture wars, nostalgia for monarchical rule - we're only really missing the replicators and nano-engineering at this point.
Recommended reading: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age</a>
protons wanna tunnel out.
Okay this is cool research<p>just one tiny tiny microscopic question...<p>why would someone use diamond wafer costing 1000x more than a silicon wafer??!<p>:)
If I'm reading this correctly it's two or threefold. Faster switching times, which both increases max speed and reduces power consumption. Avoids flaws due to silicon doping, presently we add ions to silicon to get P or N type junctions and they've found a way to get P type junctions using "2D Hole Gas" which is basically a thin layer of voids inside the bulk diamond crystal after treatment and avoids a category of flaws that affect silicon yields. Third, and this is speculation, but diamond has a way higher thermal conductivity and lower thermal expansion coefficient, so it can likely withstand higher temps and conduct heat away faster.
> why?<p>>> 50x faster switching<p>It's hard to say which applications will benefit the most, but orders of magnitude improvement tend to enable qualitative shifts downstream.<p>Not to mention, 1000x is just the cost right now while the tech is new.
The moment it becomes useful its cost will fall down to silicone prices really fast.<p>Right now you can buy 100g of diamonds for low teens in $ from China. Diamonds are produced in enormous quantities as abrasives. And if you do something on large scale you become better at it.<p>So far we haven't invested in big monocrystals because there was not much use for them aside from jewelry and probably other small niches. The moment some R&D makes something useful out of them - they will be Jevoned into oblivion.
Possibly on a par with the other exotic materials currently in use.
The higher the voltages it can handle, the faster it can switch efficiently, and the better the thermal performance, the wider its potential applications in power electronics.
Hmm, power electronics is often so big, that might need a lot of diamond and could get pricy, who knows.<p>Very low power chips might be the main application, as there is already a huge market (laptops and phones).<p>Or maybe there will be a whole set of new rf chips, profiting from the clock speed.