Vladislav Zhdanov is a professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and a winner of the Leaders of Russia national contest.
Vladislav Zhdanov’s background is physics. He graduated from the Ural State University (General and Molecular Physics), the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, the City University of London, as well as the Oxford University and the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).
He is the author of over 50 research papers and scientific articles in applied physics, economics and philosophy published in the leading Russian and foreign journals.
He worked as Vice President of the ALROSA company and as Advisor to the Director General of the Russian Railways company.
Vladislav Zhdanov told Rough&Polished about new research in diamond synthesis, the prospects for using the carbon materials and the trends in dividing the markets for natural and synthetic diamonds.
The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) posted a link on its website to your research on the ecology of diamond mining and synthesis - can this be considered a recognition?
Let’s wait for the Nobel Prize - I’m joking, of course - but the fact that the GIA paid its attention to our research A Comparative Analysis of Energy and Water Consumption of Mined versus Synthetic Diamonds, just emphasizes the interest of the professional community in the environmental aspects of diamond production. And this interest is expressed not only by the professional community because diamond jewelry consumers, and especially the younger generation, want to understand how the activities of diamond producers comply with the environmental requirements. The colleagues from the GIA understand these trends better than anyone else. I think this explains their interest in the issue, including their interest in our research.
What are you working on now? What other issues are of interest to your research team?
For my colleagues and me, diamonds are only one of many allotropic forms of carbon, although a very interesting one. Our research is broader: in particular, since our interview given to Rough&Polished, our article was published in January 2023 on measuring the thermal conductivity of carbon nanowalls, the synthesis of which occurs in the same type of CVD-reactors that are used for the diamond synthesis. And several articles are under consideration by editorial boards. One of them is the article I announced in that last interview, which compares the capital costs required for mining rough diamonds and the diamond synthesis calculated for a unit of production; in our case, it is for a carat of rough diamonds. You know, diamond mining still holds its positions in terms of cost efficiency, at least at the current performance levels of the HPHT and the MP CVD synthesis technologies.
Can the ongoing research and scientific work significantly affect the development of new areas of application of diamond technologies and expand the scope of application of carbon materials or the materials based on synthetic diamonds?
Quantum technologies are being actively developed now using rough diamonds, among other things, as quantum memory. I recommend to read an article (Experimental Demonstration of Memory-Enhanced Quantum Communication) by an international group of authors published in the prestigious journal Nature; in addition, the Institute of Applied Physics’ researchers in Nizhny Novgorod actively carry out experiments with quantum memory. Let me try to explain how this works and what rough diamonds have to do with it, and I ask the academic community to forgive me for the over-simplification.
So, we have a photon moving at the speed of light in a certain quantum state that must be remembered for subsequent operations with this information. How can this be done? How to record the information about a single zero-rest-mass photon moving at the maximum possible speed?
It’s quite simple: given the wave nature of a photon, we ‘capture’ it with a beam of other photons to obtain a ‘standing’ wave. I’m sure all readers have seen a ‘standing’ wave when they threw stones into water. Circular waves diverging from each of the stones thrown into the water and intersecting with each other form a standing wave, which is relatively stable. Actually, by replacing stones with photons, you can imagine how it works.
By the way, when I come home after midnight, I often have to explain what I actually do at my job to my children and they fully understand the case with throwing stones (I try my best to convey my scientific passion for diamonds to them).
But let’s return from pedagogics to physics: having received a standing wave, we fix its parameters to solve the problem of recording the state of a passing ‘ghost’. Taking into account the unique optical, mechanical properties of diamonds, as well as their properties as semiconductors and heat-conductors, it is obvious that diamonds are among the most promising materials for use in quantum memory elements.
What challenges does the scientific community face at present? Which topics are the most promising?
I have answered your question to some extent: of course, the development of quantum technologies is a paradigm shift because quantum communications, computers, sensors have already become things of today. A lot of scientific community’s attention is focused on quantum physics and applied technologies based on it, and diamonds find their application almost in every field due to their unique physical characteristics. To paraphrase the famous lines by the Russian poet Nekrasov, a “diamond can stop a ‘galloping’ photon, and can enter the burning plasma” - I can’t even imagine quantum technologies without the use of diamonds. It’s a very sought-after material.
As for diamond synthesis, is there any news in this area? The synthesis methods have not been changed, but processes may be constantly improved to increase the production efficiency. Is the reduction in the synthetic diamond cost possible?
In my opinion, during the year that has passed since our last interview, no fundamental breakthroughs in synthesis have happened - or my colleagues and I overlooked them. The development of the HPHT technologies continues, and the volume of the internal diamond growing reactors increases. CVD synthesis technologies are also improved and diamonds weighing tens of carats are already common. I know that some of my colleagues have laid the serious scientific groundwork in the hybrid synthesis technologies, but for ethical reasons, I will not go into details. Let’s wait for their official publications - I promise that I will be happy to immediately comment on them in your information and analytical agency Rough&Polished. This is a very interesting hybrid technology.
By the way, the cost of the gem-quality synthetic diamond production is quite affordable now, and it seems to me that the main fight now is for a size, because the larger the size is, the more areas of application for rough diamonds are available.
Will this increase the competition between natural and lab-grown diamonds? Or will the areas of application of synthetic and natural diamonds eventually separate; so, natural diamonds will be used for jewelry manufacture, and synthetic ones will be used in medical equipment, optics and in other areas of industrial application?
If we talk about areas of application, it is absolutely obvious to me that natural diamonds are beautiful with their history of millions of years, uniqueness and individuality. Considering the fact that their production is expected to drop, as well as the depletion of resources and many necessary conditions for the formation of a rough diamond in the bowels of the Earth, a natural diamond is a prize that a person receives from nature, or even better to say, wins over from nature. And it’s not always the first prize. The characteristics of mined diamonds, even of gem-quality stones, are very different, as are the characteristics of polished diamonds cut from them - from fancy-colored diamonds to colorless ones in the color range from D to Z, with clarities from the best IF to I3 (as for inclusions), from non-fluorescent gemstones to highly fluorescent ones. And in each case, of course, the size matters, as well as the cut quality. All these variables affect the diamond price, giving almost every buyer the possibility of choosing a diamond according to their budget.
Synthesis is a controlled technological process. Any technology improves over time, scales up and is used for mass-production, and the cost of the technological product declines. Suffice to remember how expensive the first plasma and LCD TVs and the first mobile phones once were (at that time, only satellite phones). The advantage of synthetic diamonds lies in the repeatability of specified characteristics and the ability to control these characteristics. This is important for industrial applications in optics and high-end technology. I have no doubt that the diamond synthesis will develop because the science, and later the industry, will need new metamaterials, and they cannot be obtained through mining. The prospect of increasing the diameter of HPHT presses and the size of the seed for CVD synthesis will ensure an increase in productivity. In future, it will also be possible to try and achieve a significant increase in the CVD reactors’ emission power. The potential for industrial applications of synthetic diamonds will depend exponentially on new technological achievements in synthesis and will open up new promising and big niches for the use of synthetic diamonds.
Despite all the efforts of marketers of synthetic diamonds who emphasize in every possible way that synthetic gemstones are ‘eco-friendly’, why do jewelry buyers still prefer natural gemstones in spite of the significant difference in the price for natural and synthetic polished diamonds, and at the same time, their absolute visual and chemical identity?
De facto, the market for lab-grown and natural diamonds is already divided by the pricing policies of their distributors, despite the completely identical physical characteristics of these diamonds.
Recently, I spent a lot of time at the art gallery, looking at one of the originals of the Black Square paintings by Kazimir Malevich. It will not be difficult for any of our readers to copy this picture; it is enough to maintain the proportions of white and black (by the way, I was surprised to learn that the areas of Malevich’s white and black fields are identical, even physicists need to go to an art gallery from time to time, this is interesting).
However, I doubt that a price of the Black Square replica will be comparable to that of the original - perhaps, the same is the case with the diamond market: the story is important for the buyer, although it is not a fact that the story of natural diamonds is more interesting than that of their CVD counterparts, ‘born’ in hydrogen-methane plasma. Now, manufacturers of gem-quality synthetic diamonds also look for new marketing strategies and creative solutions to describe the benefits of choosing lab-grown diamonds. As you correctly noted, being eco-friendly is one of the marketing moves. As my researches have shown, it would not be entirely fair to say that synthesis is an absolutely ‘green’ technology.
But let’s leave room for creativity to marketers and the right of choice to consumers. Buying a jewelry piece is always an emotional choice. It is important which emotion marketers will put into the concept of promoting synthetic or natural polished diamonds, what trigger flags they will use to convince buyers to choose the jewelry items they need.
In your opinion, how deeply is Pavel Marinychev, new CEO of ALROSA, immersed in the environmental aspects of the diamond production?
I’ve known Pavel for a long time; he has an extensive management experience. As far as I remember, the environmental issues have always been among his priorities. Especially, considering that the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the ALROSA’s main production site for diamond mining, is also Pavel Marinychev’s native land. Due to his experience, Pavel understands the uniqueness of the Yakutia’s ecosystem very well and appreciates it very much, as well as its fragility and beauty, and I am sure he values it highly.
What do diamonds mean to you? Are they a scientifically attractive carbon structure or are they, first of all, beautiful gem-quality stones that captivate women’s hearts?
This is a difficult question for me. How to compare completely different categories? During my work at ALROSA, I had the opportunity to see amazingly beautiful and mesmerizing diamonds. Both rough and polished gemstones. They were magnificent, and it was not possible not to appreciate their beauty.
As a scientist, I see the potential of carbon structures, and, believe me, they are also wonderful in their properties and characteristics, in their ability to give humanity a colossal qualitative breakthrough in technologies.
If you would express your vision of the future of diamonds in just one word, what would it be?
Possibility. The possibility of choice: synthetic or natural diamonds, the possibility of mining or synthesizing diamonds. The possibility of using diamonds for many applications. The possibility of making a woman happy by giving her a diamond jewelry piece as a gift. The possibility of using the diamonds in high-end technologies. Yes, perhaps, if expressing it succinctly and in just one word, let it be the word ‘possibility’.
Galina Semyonova for Rough&Polished
