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The ‘Picasso diamond’ shows complex growth patterns highlighted by cathodoluminescence Geoscientists can’t say if diamonds are forever, but they can say that some are already billions of years old.

First noticed in the 1960s, the phenomenon, called cathodoluminescence, gave geologists an easy way to identify quartz and other minerals in rock samples.

Now a Dutch group has found a way to collect and focus a particularly faint and localized type of cathodoluminescence that had been previously ignored, turning the glow into a precise probe of a material’s nanoscale structure.

The start-up company Delmic, based in Delft, the Netherlands, has licensed AMOLF’s cathodoluminescence technique, and Polman says that the company will soon be selling the devices to materials researchers in universities for between US$100,000 and $200,000; later it may target the laser, semiconductor and solar-cell industries.

But he says that that will be more than made up for by the creation of a community of scientists using cathodoluminescence outside the ranks of geologists.