@amigabill
Concerning those two companies you mention:
One was making yellow diamonds for the jewelry industry
only. Yellow was apparently the easiest to produce while at
the same time happening to be rare in nature (and thus
expensive for jewelry). They produce their diamonds by a
high-pressure procedure (which has just recently turned
effective enough to be worthwhile). Their synthetic diamonds
are the first that can be comparable with a real one in
quality, and which experts cannot differentiate from natural
diamonds - the only thing is that they are flawless.
The other company used another technique; they essentially
begin with a microscopic base diamond and them let carbon
"steam" (don't ask me for details) cohere to this original,
forming a perfect carbon lattice - a diamond. It takes
several weeks to grow, but it works. The cool thing is that
in the future, they plan to be able to coat any
original item with a layer of diamond. Imagine cables,
machine parts, not to mention glass windows, covered in a
layer of diamond! Pretty impressive opportunities open up.
.
SlimJim
