How Could Flawless Diamonds Change Future of Medicine?

March 21, 2010— -- The diamonds adorning the fingers of married women everywhere might be labeled as flawless, but compared to the gems at Argonne National Laboratory, they might as well be raw stones.

Using the most immaculate diamonds in the world, scientists from Argonne and elsewhere are creating a powerful, next generation X-ray laser that will shine new light on some of the smallest and most complex materials on Earth, potentially leading to new drugs or medical treatments for a broad range of diseases and conditions.

"Everything around us can be studied with X-ray lasers," said Yuri V. Shvyd'ko, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, who along with colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory recently co-authored a paper in the journal Nature Physics. "The only way we can see to build the next generation of X-ray lasers is by using diamond crystals."

X-rays have been around since the 19th century, but X-ray lasers are a much more recent development. The first X-ray laser was unveiled less than one year ago, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, which is buried underground and measures several football fields in length.

Scientists around the world use the X-ray laser for a variety of experiments in biology, physics and chemistry.

However, the number of experiments greatly outnumbers the available time that the laser can operate. To solve this problem, scientists are trying to develop other ways to create X-ray lasers.

Most lasers on Earth function by bouncing one wavelength of light back and forth between two mirrors, which are usually made of silicon. Silicon mirrors won't reflect more powerful X-rays, however.

In theory, a mirror made of diamond would reflect virtually all X-rays. The only problem with the theory was that it calls for a completely flawless diamond. No such diamond existed.

Scientists would have to build their nearly flawless diamond by spraying carbon into a high pressure chamber and letting the atoms arrange themselves into the crystal's namesake geometry. In other words, researchers had to manufacture their own diamonds.