Spring puts a sparkle in the air. That could be why diamond is
April's birthstone. Researchers at the Office of Science's
Argonne National Laboratory recently devised a way to use that
birthstone to brighten the performance of electronic devices,
which could put a bit more sparkle in everyone's day. Scientists
at Argonne's Center for Nanoscale Materials, led by
nanoscientist Anirudha Sumant, began to think differently about
diamond. Instead of seeing it as a sparkling stone, they saw it
as a formidable film, one that could take in a great deal of
heat and still conduct electricity. Their work built on
deposition techniques invented at Argonne to create films with
exceptionally tiny grains of diamond; so tiny that a billion of
the grains would fit into a single red blood cell. Those thin
sheets of diamond have a world of uses, ranging from high-
performance seals and ultra-low-friction wear coatings to
biomedical implants and biosensors (for more information, see
http://science.energy.gov/stories-of-discovery-a