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"They recall the gemologist saying he’d analyzed the diamond glass sample and concluded that Huawei had blasted it with a 100-kilowatt laser, powerful enough to
by sschueller 8y ago
"They recall the gemologist saying he’d analyzed the diamond glass sample and concluded that Huawei had blasted it with a 100-kilowatt laser, powerful enough to be used as a weapon."
What? how can you determine that from a piece of broke glass?
- krona 8y agoLaser melting is distinctive under a microscope.
- clort 8y agothe gemologist was > an FBI expert in forensic gemology and I can only presume they know what kind of power is required to melt diamond, and how it looks afterwards..
- crispyambulance 8y ago"melt" is really the wrong verb. It don't even think one can melt diamond. The correct verb would be "ablate". If one delivers enough energy to a material in a small-enough space (eg with short-pulse from a focused laser), the material "vaporizes" down to a certain depth and the process starts all over again at the bottom of the void that was ablated away. You can drill through any film this way.
- timdellinger 8y agoIt's a bit of a tangent, but there's an entire field of study called "fractography" which is all about doing things exactly like that. Further tangent: "a piece of broke glass" can exhibit interesting morphology... "mirror", "mist", and "hackle" are distinctive signatures of different fracture conditions.
- peter_d_sherman 8y agoFascinating! Did not know about that subject until now. For anyone that studies material engineering even casually, it's an important sub-topic (I never took material engineering in college, that's why I was ignorant about this subject prior to your comment). On a related note, I found this cool related link on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fracture_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fracture_mechanics. Anyway, thanks again for the comment!