The 'magic Russian diamond', as some researchers have come to call it, was just 2 millimetres square, very clear and of a quality any jeweller would be happy to set in an expensive ring. Jorg Wrachtrup, a physicist at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, had spent much of 2005 looking for something just like it; his group finally found it by trawling through journals from the Russian Academy of Sciences, reading descriptions of the physical properties of such rare gems. But Wrachtrup wasn't interested in this diamonds beauty: what intrigued him was that the stone was very pure and perfectly flawed.
展开▼
