[MUSIC PLAYING]
DIANNA COWERN: Thanks to Lockheed Martin for supporting
PBS Digital Studios.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, yo.
I'm Dianna.
You're watching "Physics Girl."
And I have a story for you.
So I just got back from the biggest gem show
in the world, the Gem and Mineral Showcase
in Tucson, Arizona, that I went to
with my friends Sophia and Kyle, because why not?
I'm finally starting back up the rock collection
I had as a kid, which was the least weird thing
that I collected.
So stick around to the end of the video
to see what we ended up getting.
But while we were in Tucson, Kyle and Sophia
and I got to talking.
We just finished many, many hours of shows.
And while we were walking around,
Sophia mentioned the-- what was it?
The magic Russian diamond.
And Kyle was like--
Ooh.
Yeah.
The question is, what is the magic Russian diamond?
It isn't actually magical.
Because I learned that that's not a thing.
DIANNA COWERN: In 2005, in Germany,
physicists were looking through scientific journals searching
for a diamond with very specific properties.
They finally found what they were
looking for-- better than they were
looking for-- in a specimen from Russia.
The unusual thing about this diamond
is that it was made of carbon--
but, like, very made of carbon.
You're thinking, Dianna, now, I know you're no chemist,
but all diamonds are made of carbon.
And they're arranged in a beautiful lattice structure.
And that's what makes them so durable.
And that's what makes them diamonds.
But most diamonds have impurities.
Like, if you go and get diamonds, like from a mine
or whatever, it's actually, like,
really hard to find a diamond that's, like, pure carbon.
Most gems have impurities.
And that's good.
Elements that don't belong in the gem, meaning that--
[BUZZER BUZZING]
--meaning that they are not the same elements
as the base chemical composition of the gem, will sneak in there
and change the gem.
For example, a ruby, which is made of aluminum oxide,
might have chromium impurities, and that's
what gives it its red color.
But the same base material, aluminum oxide, but then
with iron and titanium impurities,
will be bright blue.
That's known as the gem sapphire-- same base chemical
composition.
Now, diamonds have impurities, too.
And the purities naturally occur at a rate of about one impurity
per 1,000 carbon atoms in the lattice,
which is also about the commonness of giving birth
to triplets.
Now, impurities in the magic Russian diamond
occur at a rate of one in a billion,
which is more like the commonness of having
quintuplets, naturally-- like, not with lab practices.
How many quintuplets do you know?
So scientists wanted a diamond this pure
because they thought that it could be
useful for quantum mechanics.
Huh?
So, like, in the mid-2000s, these physicists were just
like, oh, we think that this might be useful for quantum
computing.
(LAUGHING) I'm trying to imagine how.
And in fact, they wanted the diamond for its impurities.
See, the specific impurities they were interested in
are called nitrogen vacancy centers.
They're actually a pair of impurities-- an odd couple--
consisting of a nitrogen atom replacing a carbon atom
in the lattice, and then the other one is a hole--
simply a missing carbon atom.
There's the nitrogen vacancy center.
And you can think of it as a little frozen atom
inside the diamond lattice.
And that atom has an electron spin.
Because electrons-- well, all tiny particles, really--
have a quantum property called spin.
Spin is one of the important properties
we're going to need to control and read out
for quantum computing.
So just as in modern computers, transistors
are the electronic bits that can be read out as ones and zeros.
Qubits in quantum computers will have quantum properties
that we'll need to read, like spin.
There are spins everywhere-- in this chair, in me.
And their states are-- their quantum
states are very fragile, because they're just
interacting with everything around them all the time.
DIANNA COWERN: They can be influenced
by other particles and magnetic fields around,
and they're hard to control.
But the sturdy lattice structure of the diamond
can keep the electron essentially shielded.
The nitrogen vacancy center is special in this way.
It's really protected by the diamond lattice.
It's kind of almost like a cage around it
that's keeping it from interacting
too much with other stuff.
There's just carbon in this nice, pristine lattice.
And also, in our research, we use
electron spins for high sensitivity magnetic sensing
and magnetic imaging.
Yeah.
We're applying diamonds to neuroscience--
lasers and diamonds to neurons--
all the buzz words at once.
The funny thing about this diamond is that it was tiny.
It was only two millimeters by two millimeters.
That's smaller than the size of Washington's ear
on the quarter.
But it was so perfect for research,
and the scientists couldn't find anything like it.
So they split it up and shared it among their labs
for quantum research.
It's-- so it's not cut really pretty or anything.
Like, I mean-- like, so it looks flat.
It's just, like, a little square or rectangle.
It's so pure that it's clear.
So like, if you saw it, it would look like glass.
Since 2005, scientists have learned
how to make these diamonds.
Lab grown gems are a thing.
I should know.
My dad sent me a bunch of real synthetic gems out of the blue
because he became intrigued by advances in synthetic gem
technology and ordered a bunch from China.
He said he thought I could make jewelry out of them.
This, Dad?
Really?
But Dad, I love them, for whenever you watch this video
six months later.
And thanks to all of y'all's suggestions on Twitter,
I'm going to enchant a bunch of swords and make a bunch
of gem-encrusted goblets.
Lab-grown gems are chemically and structurally
identical to real, natural gems.
This ruby really is aluminum oxide.
And it fluoresces under UV light as it should,
and there's no discernible difference.
Unless you're looking at it really close,
you can probably tell that it's much more pure than anything
you would find out in the wild.
Diamonds that are grown in a lab
can be grown to be super, super pure.
Or you can, you know, on purpose, introduce impurities.
And even more than that, you can even
engineer diamonds to have only one isotope of carbon.
So it'd be completely carbon-12--
99.999% carbon-12.
Companies can fabricate diamonds now
with very specific rates of impurities for use in jewelry
as well for uses in scientific labs.
And that's now what scientists are using
to do their quantum research.
Good stuff.
And now, as promised, the rocks.
Here they are!
Where do I put all this?
So we've got malachite and blue barite and other colors
of barite and chrysocolla.
I have realgar and [INAUDIBLE].
And I've never heard these pronounced,
so I have no idea if I'm saying them right.
And have you ever seen pure sulfur in real life?
Check that out.
Ha!
Oh!
And this is pure silicon--
silicon?
Silicon.
I don't know.
And a fossil and another fossil--
this fossil has, like-- it's been opalized.
It's got opalescence in it.
I've also got an opal.
We spent, like, an hour talking to the opal guy.
And he showed us an opal that costs over $100,000.
Ah!
And we've got some calcite, which is birefriengent.
You can see the multiple images through it.
And a shiny rock over here, and this
is a pointy rock over there.
But the one that I'm most excited about is this one.
I know this rock looks like it was
a piece of construction that accidentally fell into the rock
show.
But when you take this in the dark
and shine a UV light on it--
yeah, it fluoresces!
So I'm pretty happy.
Tell me about the coolest rocks that you've ever seen
down there in the comments.
And don't forget, you can always send me expensive precious gems
and minerals to my PO box, listed in the description.
And if you like this stuff too, my friend Natalie over at JTV
has a really cool episode about asterism,
which is an optical phenomenon in gemstones.
So check out that video and subscribe.
And that's it!
Happy "physics-ing."
One last thing--
I'd like to think Lockheed Martin for supporting
PBS Digital Studios.
If you use a weather app in the morning to dress yourself,
then you can thank weather satellites.
On March 1, 2018--
that's today-- the GOES-S weather satellite will launch
from Cape Canaveral to join its sister satellite, GOES-16,
and provide coverage to the west coast.
Thank you!
With the added capabilities of the GOES-R series
of satellites, we'll have better tracking
for all weather and early warnings for dangerous storms
across the country.
This 17th weather satellite will help your local weather alert
systems so they can report to you quickly and accurately.
Visit Lockheed Martin's website--
link in the description-- to watch GOES-S's journey
to Florida and learn about its contribution
to weather systems.
[MUSIC PLAYING]