(gentle digital music) - Hey, yo.

I'm Dianna.

You're watching "Physics Girl."

And I have a story for you.

So I just got back from the biggest gem show in the world, The Gem and Mineral Showcase in Tucson, Arizona, that I went to with my friends, Sophia and Kyle, because, why not?

I'm finally starting back up the rock collection I had as a kid, which was the least weird thing that I collected.

So stick around to the end of the video to see what we ended up getting.

But while we were in Tucson, Kyle and Sophia and I got to talking.

We just finished many, many hours of shows and while we were walking around, Sophia mentioned the, what was it?

- The magic Russian diamond.

- The magic Russian diamond.

And Kyle was like- - Ooh!

(Sophia laughs) - Yeah, the question is what is the magic Russian diamond?

(Dianna laughs) - It isn't actually magical.

(Kyle laughs) 'Cause I learned that that's not a thing.

- [Dianna] In 2005 in Germany, physicists were looking through scientific journals, searching for a diamond with very specific properties.

They finally found what they were looking for, better than they were looking for, in a specimen from Russia.

The unusual thing about this diamond, is that it was made of carbon, but like very made of carbon.

You're thinking, "Dianna, now I know you're no chemist, but all diamonds are made of carbon."

And they're arranged in a beautiful lattice structure and that's what makes them so durable, and that's what makes them diamonds.

But, most diamonds have impurities.

- Like, if you go and get diamonds like, from a mine or whatever, it's actually like, really hard to find a diamond that's like, pure carbon.

- Most gems have impurities and that's good.

Elements that don't belong in the gem, meaning that- (alarm buzzes loudly) Meaning that they are not the same elements as the base chemical composition of the gem, will sneak in there and change the gem.

For example, a ruby, which is made of aluminum oxide, might have chromium impurities.

And that's what gives it its red color.

But the same base material, aluminum oxide, but then with iron and titanium impurities, will be bright blue.

That's known as the gem, sapphire.

Same base chemical composition.

Now, diamonds have impurities too.

And impurities naturally occur at a rate of about one impurity per thousand carbon atoms in the lattice, which is also about the commonness of giving birth to triplets.

Now, impurities in the magic Russian diamond occur at a rate of one in a billion, which is more like the commonness of having quintuplets, naturally.

Like, not with lab practices.

How many quintuplets do you know?

So, scientists wanted a diamond this pure because they thought that it could be useful for quantum mechanics.

Huh?

- So, like in the mid-2000s, these physicists were just like, "Oh, we think that this might be useful for quantum computing."

(they laugh) - I'm trying to imagine how.

- And in fact, they wanted the diamond for its impurities.

See, the specific impurities they were interested in are called nitrogen-vacancy centers.

They're actually a pair of impurities, an odd couple, consisting of a nitrogen atom replacing a carbon atom in the lattice, and then the other one is a hole, simply a missing carbon atom.

- There's the nitrogen-vacancy center and you can think of it as a little frozen atom inside the diamond lattice and that atom has an electron spin.

- Because electrons, well, all tiny particles really, have a quantum property called spin.

Spin is one of the important properties we're gonna need to control and read out for quantum computing.

So just as in modern computers, transistors are the electronic bits that can be read out as ones and zeros.

Qubits in quantum computers will have quantum properties that we'll need to read, like spin.

- There are spins everywhere, in this chair, in me.

And, their quantum states are very fragile because they're just interacting with everything around them all the time.

- [Dianna] They can be influenced by other particles and magnetic fields around and they're hard to control.

But the sturdy lattice structure of the diamond can keep the electron essentially shielded.

- The nitrogen-vacancy center is special in this way.

It's really protected by the diamond lattice.

It's kind of almost like a cage around it that's keeping it from interacting too much with other stuff.

There's just carbon in this nice, pristine lattice.

- [Dianna] And also in our research, we use electron spins for high sensitivity, magnetic sensing and magnetic imaging.

- Yeah.

We're applying diamonds to neuroscience.

Lasers and diamonds to neurons.

All the buzzwords at once.

(playful music) - The funny thing about this diamond is that it was tiny.

It was only two millimeters by two millimeters.

That's smaller than the size of Washington's ear on the quarter.

But it was so perfect for research and the scientists couldn't find anything like it, so they split it up and shared it among their labs for quantum research.

- So it's not cut really pretty or anything, like.

- [Dianna] Hmm.

- I mean like, so it looks flat.

It's just like a little square.

- [Kyle] Right.

- [Dianna] Yeah.

- A rectangle.

It's so pure that it's clear.

So like, if you saw it, it would look like glass.

- Since 2005, scientists have learned how to make these diamonds.

Lab-grown gems are a thing.

I should know.

My dad sent me a bunch of (gems clink) real synthetic gems out of the blue because he became intrigued by advances in synthetic gem technology and ordered a bunch from China.

He said he thought I could make jewelry out of them.

This, Dad?

Really?

(Dianna laughs) But Dad, I love them, for whenever you watch this video six months later.

And thanks to all of y'all's suggestions on Twitter.

I'm gonna enchant a bunch of swords and make a bunch of gem-encrusted goblets.

Lab-grown gems are chemically and structurally identical to real, natural gems.

This ruby really is aluminum oxide and it fluoresces under UV light as it should, and there's no discernible difference.

Unless you're looking at it really close, you can probably tell that it's much more pure than anything you would find out in the wild.

- Diamonds that are grown in the lab can be grown to be super, super pure or, you can, you know, on purpose, introduce impurities.

And even more than that, you can even engineer the diamonds to have only one isotope of carbon, so be completely carbon-12, 99.999% carbon-12.

- Companies can fabricate diamonds now with very specific rates of impurities for use in jewelry, as well as for uses in scientific labs.

And that's now what scientists are using to do their quantum research.

Good stuff.

And now, as promised, the rocks.

Here they are!

(camera zooms) Where do I put all this?

So, we've got malachite and blue barite and other colors of barite.

And, chrysocolla and realgar and orpiment.

And I've never heard these pronounced, so I have no idea if I'm saying them right.

And, have you ever seen pure sulfur in real life?

Check that out.

Hah!

Oh, and this is pure silicon.

Silicon?

Silicon, silicon.

I dunno.

And a fossil and another fossil.

This fossil has like, it's been opalized.

It's got opalescence in it.

I've also got an opal.

We spent, like an hour talking to the opal guy and he showed us an opal that costs over $100,000.

Hah!

And we got some calcite, which is birefringent.

You can see the multiple images through it.

And a shiny rock over here and this is a pointy rock over there.

But the one that I'm most excited about, is this one.

I know this rock looks like it was a piece of construction that accidentally fell into the rock show.

But when you take this in the dark and shine a UV light on it, yeah, it fluoresces.

So, I'm pretty happy.

(Dianna laughs) And, that's it!

Happy physics-ing.