By Ronit Scheyer

With the sensitivity surrounding the issue of synthetics in the gem diamond industry, it would be easy to get the impression that man-made diamonds are a terrifying specter threatening to put the rough industry and half the polished industry out of business. But this is not the case. Far from it, in fact –because synthetic, or cultured, diamonds are much, much more. The majority of synthetic diamonds are not made for rings, studs or anything else you would find in a jewelry store display case.

 

Synthetic diamond, as a lab-created material, has been around for quite a while, and, interestingly enough, its largest producer is a company that traces its origins back to the world‘s largest natural diamond miner – back to 1946, when Sir Ernest Oppenheimer formed Industrial Distributors Ltd, the first entity to focus on the industrial uses of natural diamond. A year after its establishment, a dedicated research laboratory was set up in Johannesburg, South Africa, as a key resource into understanding materials and the development of new applications relating to diamond.

Image courtesy of Element Six

Element Six (E6), the product of this initiative, is a De Beers and Umicore joint venture headed by Jonathan Oppenheimer, Christian Hultner and Supplier of Choice architect Cyrus Jilla. Its 2007 turnover, the company said, was approximately $500 million. The entire synthetic industry, by comparison, is worth around $1.2 billion. With 4,000 employees, E6 runs 11 production and processing sites in locations such as China, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands, Ukraine, Germany, Ireland and the UK and sales offices in nine countries. Research is carried out at dedicated laboratories in the UK and South Africa and a central Market Support Centre based in Shannon, Ireland, provides technical and customer support throughout the group.

Some in the industry have long speculated that E6 (and therefore, ironically, De Beers) is poising itself to become the world‘s largest gem-quality synthetic diamond producer, a conjecture they say is supported by the recent appointment of Jilla, with his expertise in strategizing through the gem market, to CEO of E6. For now, though, the vast majority of E6’s research and production energies are invested in synthetic diamond material for a plethora of industrial purposes.

The E6 project portfolio is divided into four distinct entities:

• Advanced Materials – covering the development of ‘supermaterials’ for premium performance tooling solutions used for cutting, drilling, grinding and polishing applications in various industries.
• Hard Materials – devoted to material solutions for the construction and mining sectors and other applications for diverse industries needing specialist tooling solutions.
• Oil & Gas – a leading supplier of supermaterials to the oil and gas industry worldwide, developing solutions for oil and gas exploration and production.
• Technologies – working toward opening new markets for E6 supermaterials based on synthetic diamond produced by a new manufacturing process.

While E6’s Technical Information Manager Elaine McClarence declined to discuss details such as volume or price, she revealed that of the “major traditional industrial areas [the company] sells into, the top three are Stone & Construction, Oil & Gas and Automotive.” Applications exploiting diamond’s extreme engineering properties are also being explored in numerous industries from medicine to electronics and mining to high-energy physics and beyond.

 

In August, the company provided an update on a venture capital fund it has launched to invest in innovative activities related to the use of synthetic diamond. E6 Ventures is a $100 million fund “open to a broad range of investment opportunities across industry.”

The fund aims to be recognized as an active investor in new applications, new markets, new technologies and new companies with projects ranging from seed/early stage start-ups to growth and late-stage investments. In addition to its own resources, the fund maintains relationships with university and research institutes and major industry players worldwide, as well as access to a network of potential co-investment capital sources with which it shares deal flow.

 

Examples of the fund‘s current portfolio include companies spanning sensing, electronics and wastewater treatment, such as a firm that designs, develops, manufactures and sells a range of diamond detectors and sensors for applications like high-energy physics, ionisizing radiation, deep-uv monitoring and elemental analysis. Another develops novel diamond semiconductor materials and processing technology with the aim of creating the next generation of high-powered, high-frequency semiconductor devices.

 

One particularly interesting entity that has enjoyed the fund‘s attention is Advanced Oxidation Technology (AOT), which designs and builds electrochemical reactors, with “banks of large diamond polycrystalline diamond electrodes, used for electrochemistry,” according to E6, for the treatment of wastewater, soil and sludge. The reactors operate on a cost-effective catalyzed chemical oxidation process and have great implications for both treating wastewater in large urban areas and in providing solutions to people in developing countries for whom clean water is a life-or-death need.

 

Advanced Oxidation’s process, the company says, has been particularly effective for treating sulfide-related odor issues and is currently being used “at large industrial and municipal treatment facilities across the U.S.” AOT’s technologies are divided into four processes – Groundwater Treatment, treating toxic organic chemicals within groundwater; Soil Treatment, treating recalcitrant organic chemicals at the lowest cost possible; Wastewater Catalyst, treating toxic organic compounds without the need for high capital investment, and Hydrogen Sulfide and Odor Treatment, oxidation of hydrogen sulfide and other odor-producing compounds. In addition to the independent companies in which E6 Ventures invests, Element Six has also launched a number of startups.

 

Diamond Detectors Limited develops sensors for all kinds of radiation detectors, which, among other things, are used in medical dosimetry, or the measurement and calculation of dosages for treating cancer patients. Dosimeters calibrate the machines that deliver these therapies for each patient, and diamond detectors, according to E6, offer a number of advantages over current dosimeters.

 

Diamond detectors are also used in high-energy physics research – the highest energy particle accelerator ever constructed began operating in May of this year, using synthetic diamond detectors to help “unlock the secrets of the Big Bang,” according to an April 2007 article published in Industrial Diamond Review. The accelerator, housed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland – known by the French acronym CERN – was built to help physicists study the collision of particles at extremely high energies and the decay behavior of the collision products. Synthetic diamond, according to the article, can be used for monitoring and detecting applications relevant to the process, “particularly where silicon cannot be used over long periods of time.”

 

Some applications – particularly in the “beam condition monitoring system,” according to McClarence – use diamond already, while additional ones could use diamond later on, “as the collider moves toward higher collision energies and intensities where current detection technology cannot survive the harsh radiation environment for long periods.”

 

Diamond material also has the potential to provide solutions to researchers building quantum computers, running on quantum logic elements such as superposition and entanglement, which only occur at the atomic level, according to a February Industrial Diamond Review article.

“One of the approaches to making quantum logic gates is based on optical technology and diamond is perhaps the ideal material in this role,” E6‘s Elaine McClarence writes in the article. The process utilizes ‘deficiencies’ in a diamond‘s lattice structure created by the presence of nitrogen. In addition, diamond is attractive in this process as it works at room temperature, where other materials require low temperatures to work.

“Diamond material processing is important to the project. For quantum computing, it will be important to be able to produce ultra-pure diamond material with highly controlled properties where the N-V defects that will form the qubits (quantum equivalent of computer ‘bits’) can be introduced as known locations. Then the diamond has to be built into the discrete structures required of a quantum information system analogous to the components that make up a conventional computer.”

 

Without getting too technical, a qubit, short for quantum bit, is a unit of quantum information. The difference between a bit and a qubit is that while the former can only exist in one state at one time (either ‘1’ or ‘0’), a qubit can, according to the quantum law of superposition, exist in both states simultaneously. The qubit is forced into a state (either ‘1’ or ‘0’) by the act of measuring its state, an act carried out by optical or magnetic methods.

According to the article, “It has been suggested that a quantum computer of forty qubits could have the power of one of today‘s supercomputers.” In an example more relevant to the average person, in a ‘quantum’ future, information contained on bank and credit cards could be “encrypted using quantum cryptography, with diamond as the single photon source that makes it all possible.”

As would be expected, Research & Development plays a major part of the E6 business. Steve Coe is general manager of Element Six, Ascot, where the company carries out research and development into CVD (chemical vapor deposition), the technology that produces diamond material for advanced engineering applications.

“Basically research and development breaks down into two main categories. The research is aimed at new product development and long-term cost reduction,” Coe explains. In regard to new product development and with an eye to the future of synthetic diamond research, Coe says that the department is focused on developing “synthetic diamond products in engineered forms (typically this includes 3D components, electrically conductive structures and new and improved grades of synthetic diamond) suited to specific market applications.” In addition, in terms of E6’s efforts toward long-term cost reduction, “Ongoing R&D is important to drive down the cost of manufacturing synthetic diamond products and thereby facilitate their adoption across a wider market space,” he adds.

 

In an effort to translate the cryptic tech jargon, McClarence explains that Coe’s goals in terms of new product development translate to “new types of synthetic technologies and improvements to existing production…aimed at making novel products such as a loudspeaker tweeter, electrodes and novel coatings that give [E6] new markets or the ability to offer better products.”

Likewise, in reference to his comments about cost-reduction, she says, “This will give the company a competitive edge in the market to grow new and existing markets.”