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Well, I have my favorites here.
These are diamonds.
And I use diamonds for my research,
so the museum is great for reference material.
But it doesn't just sit there and we just
don't do anything about it.
Actually, we do active research.
So my area of expertise is diamonds
and when I first took the position a few years ago,
I was just stunned by this collection of micromounts.
Well, micromounts for diamonds is already pretty big in size.
And I opened several drawers and you have these entire two
columns here full of diamonds.
And when I saw this drawer here specifically,
it was full of diamonds, purple to pink in color.
And well, guess what?
I work on pink diamonds, so that's
when I took the position.
I actually looked at those diamonds and took a bunch out
and now they are ready to be analyzed and, hopefully, be
published on.
And the great thing about this collection in particular
is that the collector was really specific about what he wanted,
meaning that he classified them, sometimes by color, sometimes
by locality, by shape.
So this is really well organized,
which is perfect for case study, actually.
I could even do some research on the morphology of diamonds
thanks to this amazing collection.
So I can show you a few of those pink diamonds, for example.
I already took the best ones out for my research, actually.
But you can see this little guy, for example,
is a kind of purple octahedron.
Let me look on the back.
It doesn't say where it comes from,
but again, it says "surfacing light planes, lamellar growth."
And that's exactly what pink diamonds are about.
It's actually-- the pink color is not
homogeneous in the diamonds.
They're in lamellae.
And this collector, already on the rough diamond,
was able to notice that.
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Weber-Perloff Connection.
This collection, yes, it's like tens of thousands of minerals.
Not only diamonds that he was connecting--
Gold and everything from different localities.
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I have several interests.
Research interests, the first one
that I began working on when I was
a post-doc back at the Smithsonian
was the color of diamonds.
I was working on pink and blue diamonds.
Pink because, for many years, we've
been asking ourselves the question
of where the pink color comes from.
The answer is, we still don't know,
and people have been working on that for over 40 years now.
We're getting closer and closer to finding the answer though
and we noticed that in some of those pink diamonds,
the pink lamellae are actually twin planes
that's are due to plastic deformation.
And we know that the force, the effects
responsible for the pink color is within those twin planes.
But again, the exact nature we don't know.
Most likely, it's related to some kind of nitrogen vacancy
impurity, which is kind of classic, typical of diamonds.
But we just don't know.
So I'm still working on those and this collection
is going to be very helpful because, some of them,
I know the locality.
And again, it looks like, depending
on where the pink diamond comes from,
the color is kind of different.
For example, Argyle diamonds in Australia
behave much differently than pink diamonds
from other localities.
I was working on blue diamonds as well,
and this time it was for the boron content.
The boron is the impurity that creates
the blue color in diamonds.
And it's real difficult to look at the content of boron
in a diamond because it's so small.
The amount is so small that classical methods,
you can't detect the boron in it.
So we're trying to do that.
And another of my research interests
is more about the geology of the diamonds,
meaning trying to understand what the diamond can tell you
about the environment it was formed in in the first place.
Meaning that diamonds come from very deep inside the earth--
they are formed in the earth mantle.
And diamonds are actually the only mineral that comes back
to the surface completely preserved, completely intact.
For example, another very typical mineral of the mantle
is peridot.
But peridot, when it comes back to the surface in peridotites
through basaltic eruption, it changes structure.
So it doesn't give you enough clues
to-- doesn't give you perfect clues into the mantle.
So that's what I'm trying to study as well.
And again, this collection might be a really good thing for me
because I will know the locality of some of those diamonds,
meaning I can look into diamonds from a very specific mine
with a specific geology condition.
For example, possible subduction area, possible place
under some very specific cratons,
such as the South African cratons, and things like that.
So, you know, I can pull more drawers
and show you how many diamonds there are in this collection.
It's really unbelievable.
We have some really rare colors as well.
We don't have that many blues, but we
have the rare green diamonds.
And the green color is due to irradiation,
natural irradiation.
And right now, we can't make the difference
between green diamonds where the color comes from-- irradiation
in a lab versus irradiation in geologic environments.
So again, really good material for study.
I can show you this one here.
It's not green, but it's kind of big.
You know, like we say, it's micromounts,
but look at this one.
It's, like, over a centimeter across.
That's a big diamond and when I look at the shape--
I didn't study it, but most likely that might be a Type II
diamond.
There you go.
The best one in there.
Yeah, so this one is fun.
Sometimes, they're not only single crystals.
They can be intergrowth, twins.
Some diamonds actually look like flowers
sometimes when you look close at them.
Spheres.
Depending on the growth rate-- for example,
you will have a cubic diamond versus a sphere
versus a very nice octahedron.
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