Matthew Hart on mayhem in the diamond industry.
The diamond world was stunned when De Beers, the storied diamond miner, announced this month it was ditching its lab-grown diamond business. De Beers had been selling lab-grown gems online through its Lightbox brand for six years, at prices its competitors found hard to beat.
But the lab-grown diamond price was crashing, and De Beers will now focus its $94 million Oregon diamond factory away from gemstone production and onto something much more exciting: diamonds for targeted industrial uses.
Among these new and often secret uses is the place of diamonds in the race to develop a quantum computer—the mind-boggling doomsday machine that China and the United States are desperate to get to first. De Beers diamond-technology experts have put the company in the forefront of this race, with their ability to manipulate tiny diamonds at the atomic level.
Characteristics such as “vacancies”—missing atoms—allow such stones to perform a crucial function for quantum machines, which will complete in minutes calculations that today’s fastest supercomputers would take years to finish. The plot for my new novel, The Lucifer Cut, revolves around these developments. But first—how did diamonds get where they are now?
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