By diamond testers I mean the ones from videos online that lights up all the way if a diamond is real. How do lab grown not also set those off?
In: 15
My memory is a bit out of date on this subject, but here goes…
One method of detecting lab diamonds is due to atomic inclusions (~~nitrogen~~, I think – don’t know what the element is). Both lab and natural diamonds have these. When the diamond is formed, it sometimes gets a ~~nitrogen~~ atom in one of the places a carbon atom is supposed to be. These inclusions can “hop around” in the crystal – meaning that they occasionally swap places with an adjacent carbon.
If the diamond is kept in a very hot environment for a very very long time (centuries or millenia, maybe) the inclusions have plenty of opportunity to hop all over. There’s a slight energy advantage to them clustering near each other, so in a natural diamond, you would find inclusions that are groups of ~~nitrogens~~. Potentially too small to see though, even with a microscope. But in a lab grown diamond, they’re mostly dispersed as single nitrogen atoms
These single-atom defects are called “color centers” because they do weird things with light. Like, when exposed to UV light, the color centers convert the invisible UV light to visible blue light. This doesn’t happen when there’s a cluster of odd atoms grouped together.
Color centers are also responsible for colored diamonds, I think. Like yellow diamonds probably have a bunch of color centers of some specific element.
So shine a UV light on the diamond. If it lights up bright blue, it’s lab grown. If not, natural.
Caveat: This info is years old, and it’s possible they’ve since come up with ways to decrease the color center formation in lab conditions. Also I don’t remember which element causes the UV-blue fluorescence.
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