this year is the Diamond Jubilee of Her
Majesty the Queen that is 60 years after
she became Queen and all over the UK and
the British Commonwealth people are
making tributes to her to celebrate this
happy occasion
last Monday Brady and I were filming in
the lab and suddenly we had a mad idea
we ought to do a tribute from periodic
videos because after all diamonds are
chemicals
the first problem was we needed a Damond
but very fortunately we used diamonds
very little ones for our infrared
spectroscopy and one of my students had
broken the mount of one of the diamonds
so we had one that we couldn't use for
science so that problem was solved the
next question was what to do with the
diamond and the obvious thing is to put
a picture of her majesty onto the
diamond the difficulty is that first of
all atoms rather small and secondly
there are real issues about trying to
write on the surface of a diamond
diamond is made of carbon and the carbon
atoms are all bonded together which
makes it really very hard in fact a
piece of diamond is a single molecule
because all the atoms are joined
together
fortunately my colleagues and the
nanotechnology Center have a really good
engraving machine which uses accelerated
ions of gallium and can really make an
image on almost any surface because
these gallium ions are going like
bullets at huge speed and will chip off
material from any surface but that in
itself produces another problem because
the gallium ions are electrically
charged they're positively charged and
so when they hit the surface if it
doesn't conduct electricity the surface
will charge up and eventually will get
so positively charged that the electric
field deflects the ions away from your
picture and Damond
is not electrically conducting when we
took the diamonds along to have a
picture put onto it we tried a number of
different settings first of all we just
tried it with the diamond and we got
quite a nice picture of the Queen but it
was very foggy now you could say that
was really good because the year she
became Queen there was the worst fog in
London that anybody could ever remember
you could hardly see more than a few
feet in front of you but it doesn't make
a very good picture so then we put a
very thin layer of carbon black carbon
that conducts electricity on the surface
and then when the ions hit the surface
they could gouge out the image because
the our thin layer was so thin that it
didn't affect the engraving but it did
conduct away the electrical charge right
more or less and I think that the result
is really pretty pleasing it looks very
like the Queen and from the scientific
point of view it looks very like the
picture that we used to make it you can
put one on top of the other and they
match perfectly
so there is a self it broke week so here
is the diamond it's really very small
you can hardly see it and unlike a jewel
diamond it is just cut as a simple
triangular prism and of course the
pictures of her majesty that are on the
diamond are so small that without a
microscope you can't see them at all the
image the larger image is nearly a
hundred microns high 92 microns high 64
microns wide the smaller one is half
that size so 46 microns high and 32
microns wide if you're interested in
statistics you could get $300,000 Gees
of this size onto a single postage stamp
for those of you who don't live in the
UK we have a picture of the Queen on all
of the UK postage stamps so there is the
really the question what do we do with
this and Brady's idea is that we should
send it to the Queen though I'm not sure
what she would do with it I think that
we should perhaps ask around and find
out if there are any exhibitions either
here or more widely in the UK of
interesting objects connected with the
Diamond Jubilee and let them show it but
we'd be interested to hear if you have
any ideas what we should do with this
now we've made it
you