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Looking anew at diamonds

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Fascinated by diamonds? Then join marriageable singles, African guerillas, diamond merchants and smugglers, all of whom prize these clear carbon crystals for reasons related to size, color and value. Still, unless it's a rock as unusual as the Hope diamond, it's often hard to tell one natural diamond from the next. The Hope, we remind you, is a high-net-worth crystal that was mined in India during the 1600s, and now lives under lock and key at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

A new study sheds light on this identification problem, and also explains why the Hope looks blood-red under ultraviolet light -- a color not always seen in other blue diamonds.

Natural diamonds are messengers from the past that formed under great heat and enormous pressure deep inside the planet, and then were rapidly lifted to the surface in a volcanic eruption.

Diamond is an ultra-hard form of crystallized carbon that refracts light -- and light is the best way to investigate diamonds, unless you are allowed to bust them up, which the Smithsonian would probably prohibit on its most popular exhibit.

So when a group of researchers from the Smithsonian, Pennsylvania State University and the Naval Research Laboratory wanted to explore the unusual glow of the Hope, they used light. More specifically, they used spectroscopy, which breaks light into its component wavelengths for analysis.

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The light touch

Spectroscopy indirectly reads the activity of electrons as they orbit atoms in a sample. When electrons are exposed to energy, they can get excited and jump to a higher orbit. Then, when they drop back to their former orbit, they release energy in the form of photons -- particles of light.

Electrons on each element make a particular wavelength of light through this process, and that individuality allows spectroscopists to "read" the chemical makeup of a distant star.

The researchers lit the diamond with ultraviolet (UV) light, which is powerful enough to kick electrons to higher orbits.

The researchers could not hope to haul the Hope to a university lab, so they had to work around the museum's exhibition hours. "If you want to study the Hope diamond using spectroscopy, you need to bring the machine to the Hope diamond," says Peter Heaney, a professor of geosciences at Penn State. "You cannot bring the Hope to the machine."