What we'll do is we'll take the rough diamond, the one that you
see on the left there, and we'll place the diamond
into a holder, a little jig like this.
This is an aluminum block with holes in it.
And I have screws here that I can adjust,
so they will come close to the diamond.
And I'll take glue stick.
Glue stick is just standard kindergarten glue stick.
So the trick is to hold the diamond ever
so loosely with the glue stick.
Now the glue stick works like a charm because what happens
is the diamond has very high thermal conductivity.
And it will immediately glymerize the glue stick.
And the glue stick will actually hold the diamond very,
very-- the minute the laser energy hits the diamond,
it will send that heat through the diamond
and stick it very hard to the glue stick
and hold it very nicely.
So we'll cut the diamond on a laser system
that I don't have here.
It's in another building.
And then take the wafer of cut diamond
out and polish it on a normal scaife, typical of what
would make facets on a normal gem diamond.
And that's what we've done here.
Basically, we've put this particular plate
down on the scaife and polished it, both sides,
so that we can take a good close look at it.
When we have the plate like this, often when we
make the cut, we're going to try to orient the wafer of diamond
that we cut out so that it goes across the 1 1 1 faces so
that we can see the zoning in the diamond.
If we're parallel to 1 1 1, we end up
being parallel to the growth zones.
And the diamond will look homogeneous.
In truth, the diamond isn't homogeneous.
We want to have our cut be intersecting those growth
zones.
And we'll take these plates.
And we'll go someplace where we can do cathode luminescence,
either on the electron microprobe.
Or we'll go to the Smithsonian and use
their microscope-based cathode luminescence unit.
And we'll look at the CL zoning to see where the inclusions sit
relative to growth zones.
Before we break the plate, we want
to document where the growth zones intersect inclusions
to see if an inclusion might have an apparent older age
if it's near the edge and how that age, with regard
to the growth zone, compares with the position
of the other inclusions.
Now the other thing that we often
like to do before we break things up
is to do in situ analyses for carbon isotopes and nitrogen
isotopes on the diamond.
Carbon isotopes turn out to be a very, very important indicator
of diamond provenance.
Whether the carbon is mantle-like or isotopically
very light, which might suggest it's recycled carbon
from organic material or if it's isotopically heavy,
which might suggest that it's material
from carbonate, recycled carbonate.
And the time to do that is now, before we break the plate,
because the plate holds that history in it.
And we have the inclusions in the context of the history.
We have the zoning from the cathode luminescence.
And so we can, then, use that cathode luminescence
to guide where we do the analyses.
And we can get the isotopic composition at this time.
The other thing that we want to do on the plate
is also do a nitrogen aggregation study.
So we'll do infrared spectroscopy
on the plate to look at the amount of nitrogen that's there
and the degree to which it exists
as individual centers, or aggregates, of nitrogen.
And that's a common thing in the diamond industry.
But the plates are really good to do this
with because they give us a controlled thickness and a very
flat optical surface that we can get very precise IR data with.