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De Beers Group is proud to continue two decades of support for the De Beers Laboratory for Diamond Research at the University of Alberta with the recent donation of a new spectrometer.

The $152,000 Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer system is an integral research tool at the University and it helps scientists look back billions of years in time to when diamonds were formed and learn about a region of Earth that is otherwise inaccessible.

The new spectrometer replaces a similar device that was donated by De Beers in 2003 and continues the partnership that has helped establish the De Beers Laboratory for Diamond Research as one of the leading facilities of its kind in the world. The equipment was unveiled at UAlberta in Edmonton on September 15, 20 years to the day the original spectrometer was unveiled at the University.

CLICK HERE to see the University of Alberta story on the donation.

Thomas Stachel, Canada Research Chair in Diamonds and researcher with the U of A’s graduate training program Diamond Exploration Research Training School (DERTS), said: “This instrument is the absolute workhorse of what we do. This is where all of our research starts. Diamonds give us a window back in time more than three billion years. There is no other material where you can look so far back in time.”

Diamonds are formed about 150 km beneath the surface of the earth, in a region of the mantle where the right conditions of temperature, pressure and carbon species can be found.

The new spectrometer was needed because replacement parts were no longer available for the original device.

It is currently used by six students to pursue their thesis research and the original device has been used by 40 undergraduate students and graduate students during the past two decades and provided data for more than 100 scientific publications.

Leyla Lavenir, De Beers Group Senior Exploration Manager – North America, said: “We’re proud that our original contribution helped establish the De Beers Laboratory for Diamond Research as one of the leading facilities of its kind and we look forward to new and exciting discoveries by researchers who use the new spectrometer. The information we get from this leading research helps us understand how diamonds were formed and the conditions that exist deep inside the Earth, and also helps us in our search for new diamond deposits.”

In addition to diamond research, paleontologists at the university have used it, for example, to examine from which trees amber derives and it is also made available to geologists from other universities and companies to advance their studies.

Although it provides essentially the same information as the original spectrometer, the new instrument is faster and has improved imaging capabilities. By shining an infrared light through a diamond, said Stachel, geologists can determine the age of a diamond, the type of diamond it is and much more.