Chemical fingerprints on blood diamonds

“Fortunately, the majority of gentlemen who are persuaded to steal things don’t really know a huge amount about science”

This is a choice quote in a fascinating article, New Australian technology tracks down gold thieves and blood diamonds ["New tech to trace dodgy diamonds" in the print edition] in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) Weekend.

It describes the work of John Watling, Chief Scientist at the company Source Certain. Basically by measuring the relative amounts of different trace elements [chemical impurities] in a sample of gold or diamond one can determine what mine that it has come from.


Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 3, 2021 at 6:53 AM

    Besides identifying blood diamonds, I suppose this may be used to help preserve the diamond monopoly held by De Beer!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is it an Unidentified Superconducting Object (USO)?

If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new material. There is a long history of this and it is worth considering the wise observations of Robert Cava , back in 1997, contained in a tutorial lecture. It would have been useful indeed in the early days of the field [cuprate superconductors] to have set up a "commission" to set some minimum standard of data quality and reproducibility for reporting new superconductors. An almost countless number of "false alarms" have been reported in the past decade, some truly spectacular. Koichi Kitazawa from the University of Tokyo coined these reports "USOs", for Unidentified Superconducting Objects , in a clever cross-cultural double entendre likening them to UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects, which certainly are their equivalent in many ways) and to "lies" in the Japanese translation of USO.   These have caused g
Read more

What is Herzberg-Teller coupling?

Image
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thrown around. Google scholar yields more than 3000 hits. But I have found its precise meaning and the relevant physics hard to pin down. Quantum mechanics in chemistry by Schatz and Ratner is an excellent book , but the discussion on page 204 did not help me. "Herzberg-Teller" never appears in Atkins' Molecular quantum mechanics. So here is my limited understanding. Herzberg and Teller wanted to understand why one observed certain vibronic (combined electronic and vibrational) transitions that were not expected, particularly some that were expected to be forbidden on symmetry grounds. " Intensity borrowing " occurred. Herzberg and Teller pointed out that his could be understood if the dipole transition moment for the electronic transition depended on the nuclear co-ordinate associated with the vibration. In the Franck-Condo
Read more

What should be the order of authors on a conference poster or talk?

I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With regard to paper authorship my general rule is that the person who does the bulk of the work, including actually writing the paper should be the first author. Doug Natelson has a good post on co-authorship , that I largely agree with. My only difference is that I am not really convinced that good practice prevails in the majority of circumstances. I fear there are increasing numbers of co-authors, particularly senior ones, with marginal contributions. But, what about conference talks and posters? Many of these are based on work that is already or about to be published. Should the author order be identical as the associated papers? I am not sure it should necessarily be. My tentative view is that the person who writes and submits the abstract and actually prepares and presents the post/talk should be the first author. Perhaps they should also highlig
Read more