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  • this year is the damage jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen.

  • That is 60 years after she became queen on all over the UK and the British Commonwealth.

  • People are making tributes to her to celebrate this happy occasion.

  • Last Monday, Brady and I were filming in the lab and suddenly we had a mad idea.

  • We ought to do a tribute from periodic videos because after all, diamonds are chemicals.

  • The first problem was we needed a dam and but very fortunately, we use diamonds.

  • Very little ones for our infrared spectroscopy on one of my students had broken the mount of one of the diamonds, so we had one that we couldn't use for science.

  • So that problem was solved.

  • The next question was what to do with the diamond?

  • And the obvious thing is to put a picture of Her Majesty onto the diamond.

  • The difficulty is that, first of all, how damn is rather small.

  • And secondly, there are really issues about trying to write on the surface of a diamond Damn and is made of carbon And the carbon atoms are all bonded together, which makes it really very hard.

  • In fact, a piece of diamond is a single molecule because all the atoms are joined together.

  • Fortunately, my colleagues and the nanotechnology center have a really good engraving machine, which uses accelerated irons of gallium and can really make an image on almost any surface because thes Galya man's air going like bullets at a huge speed and will chip off material from any surface.

  • But that's in itself produces another problem because the galley mines air electrically charged, positively charged, and so when they hit the surface, if it doesn't conduct electricity, the surface will charge up.

  • And eventually we'll get so positively charged that the electric field deflects the irons away from your picture, and Diamond is not electrically conducting.

  • When we took the diamonds along tohave, a picture put on to it, we tried a number of different settings.

  • First of all, we just tried it with the diamond, and we got quite a nice picture of the Queen, but it was very foggy.

  • Now you could say that was really good, because the years she became queen, there was the worst folk in London that anybody could ever remember.

  • You could hardly see more than a few feet in front of you, but it doesn't make a very good picture.

  • So then we put a very thin layer of carbon black carbon that conducts electricity on the surface.

  • And then when the irons hit the surface, they could gouge out the image because our thin layer was so thin that it didn't affect the engraving.

  • But it did conduct away the electrical, and I think that the result is really pretty pleasing.

  • It looks very like the Queen.

  • And from the scientific point of view, it looks very like the picture that we used to make it.

  • You can put one on top of the other and they match perfectly good.

  • Thank you.

  • That is I myself fit for a queen.

  • So here is the diamond.

  • It's really very small.

  • You can hardly see it.

  • And unlike a jeweled diamond, it is just cut is a simple triangular prism on dhe, Of course, the pictures of Her Majesty the trodden the diamond is so small that without a microscope you can't see them at all.

  • The image The larger image is nearly 100 microns high 92 microns high 64 microns wide.

  • The smaller one is half that size, so 46 microns high on dhe, 32 microns wide.

  • If you're interested in statistics, you could get 300,000 old images of this size onto a single postage stamp.

  • For those of you who don't live in the UK, we have a picture of the queen on all of the UK postage stamps.

  • So there is the really the question.

  • What do we do with this on Dhe?

  • Brady's idea is that we should send it to the queen that I'm not so what she would do with it, I think that we should perhaps ask around and find out if they're in the exhibition's either here or more widely, in the UK of interesting objects connected with the dam and Jubilee and let them so it.

this year is the damage jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen.

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