A Diamond Of A Year

Year four of graduate school turned out to be the best year, even counting the discouraging surprise at the end. I’d finished all my required classes and managed to scrape through the scariest ones, quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, and loaf through the easy ones. I’d passed my qualifying exam because I wowed my committee with my presentation skills to the point that they didn’t notice its questionable depth of content. And I had an approved thesis topic: the synthesis of a metastable high-temperature superconductor using high pressure. Just In case that doesn’t sound cool enough already, here’s some context: the pressure was measured in gigapascals! Whoa! Are you on the edge of your seat yet?

That’s how I ended up spending time with geophysicists. You know the old adage: If you want to generate high pressures, go straight to the people who spend their time thinking about the core of the Earth.

Instead of having to do the experiment at the center of the Earth, which my lab at Stanford wouldn’t pay for and my health insurance refused to cover, I went straight to the geophysics lab of Raymond Jeanlow, or RayJay as he was known. RayJay had a diamond anvil cell that was configured so that you could shoot xrays straight through it, to figure out what was going on with the material inside. Young professor RayJay, with his waist length wavy brown hair and twenty-year-older professor girlfriend in Santa Cruz, was pretty excited that he had equipment that fancy old Stanford didn’t have. My advisor at Stanford had neatly cut white hair and a chaired professorship and a mantle full of accolades and was married to a Levi-Strauss heiress and lived in Woodside, and didn’t give a rat’s trump whether UC Berkeley had equipment he didn’t have. When I went to his house once he squeezed me some orange juice from the trees outside his front door.

Here’s the experiment I was trying to do. The current Olympic gold for superconductors was held by niobium-three-tin. Tinny had held the record for many years, and I was trying to kick it off its platform by substituting germanium for tin. Tinny’s winning transition temperature was eighteen point three degrees Kelvin. My boy Germy was predicted to kick Tinny’s trump at over nineteen degrees kay.

Sidebar: Nineteen kay is minus two hundred fifty-four Celsius and minus four hundred twenty-five Fahrenheit. My thesis would be based on about one degree’s difference, a few degrees above absolute zero, the point at which all matter grinds to a halt and atoms don’t even look from side to side to see what their neighbors are doing. To be clear: no one would care about this work, except the other six people in the world who worked in the same area. There were no practical implications other than getting me through graduate school. End of sidebar.

The problem with my boy Germy was that he was unstable. You couldn’t get him to stand still long enough to compete, let alone mount the platform to receive his gold medal while the Stanford anthem played.

Tinny, in contrast, was a fine upstanding middle-aged citizen, and as long as you cooled him down using liquid helium, he could strut and flex all day long. He’d stood on the gold medal platform so long that he’d built a tiny house and moved in with his chihuahua.

So I was going to dislodge Tinny and his tiny house and tiny dog, and instate Germy by using RayJay’s diamond anvil cell. Here’s the diagram I planned to draw in my pee-aitch-dee thesis, under the section called Experimental Setup. Be sure to read the caption.

Figure 1. Experimental setup: X = xray maker, D1 = diamond 1, S = sample, D2 = diamond 2, F = film. Pressure exerter indicated by red outline and pressure by big see-thru arrows. T = turnie-knob that controls pressure. Bright green dashed line indicates xray beam.

I would call Germy sample to make him sound scientific, so they would give me my degree.

The diamonds were nearly flawless gem-quality diamonds, with sharp points at the place they’d normally be mounted by Tiffany into fancy engagement rings. I would put a speck of Germy between the points, crank up the pressure to core-o’-the-Earth levels, and pre-Olympic Germy would change into happy, stable, superconducting, gold medal-winning Germy.

Of course, he wouldn’t really be stable. He’d be metastable, like a schizophrenic with just the right drug cocktail—good until the drugs wore off. Germy needed to be stable just long enough for me to measure his hypothesized record-breaking superconducting prowess.

Now listen, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea: Germy was not unstable in his ordinary life. He just wasn’t winner material. My dissertation was going to rely on taking him from his preferred state of non-superconducting slothdom and press him, persuade him, form him into Germy the winner of the Superconducting Olympics gold medal.

It was easy to make regular pre-Olympic Germy. Anyone could do this in their own kitchen, using ingredients from a well-supplied grocery store.

Get out a small mixing bowl. A very small one is all you need. Add three tiny spoonfuls of niobium, and one tiny spoonful of germanium. Stir with a clean toothpick. Mixture should look like a black powder. Maybe smush it a little with a tiny mortar and pestle to get it to combine. That’s it.

I spent two seconds upstairs in the my department's little chemistry lab making pre-Olympic Germy, then scooted his black-powder self into a teeny-weeny bag, zipped the bag securely into my backpack, and drove across the SF Bay to Union City, where I got on the BART to Berkeley. BART didn’t go down the peninsula in the mid-1980s, so Union City was the closest station to Palo Alto.

During my daily ride to Berkeley that year, I would put on bulky headphones and whip out the choral sheet music I was studying, as part of my real life as a soprano in the University Chorus. I had a Sony Discman with a see-dee, a compact disc. Sang along, quietly, just below the high decibel background rumbles and screeches of the BART, and made good use of the hour or so trip. Sometimes I read The New Yorker instead, another part of my real life back then.

I lifted one headphone when we passed the Fruitvale Station, just to see if the announcer who said Foo-veh was on board that day.

There was a distinguished researcher who spoke at one of our Tuesday Applied Physics Seminars who kept talking about Pie Kannjah T’bonns. You’re smarter than I if you figured out he was saying pi conjugated bonds. Luckily it was written on his very last slide, Summary.

At the other end of the BART ride, I’d walk down Shattuck Avenue past people who wanted to sell me little plastic bags of powders that looked an awful lot like Germy. I wasn’t fooled for a minute. I just said No, as Nancy Reagan had taught me. More likely I said, No, thank you, as my parents had taught me.

After hoofing it up the hill to the geophysics lab, I arrived at RayJay’s lab, where the two graduate students, who were secretly dating but RayJay wasn’t allowed to know, greeted me. El and Queue were great people, funny and warm and smart as heck. Both of them got tenure-track jobs at UC Santa Cruz afterwards.

For those of you who have never tried to get two tenure-track positions at the same decent university, you should know that El and Queue are the only examples in all recorded history.

The first time they showed me how to use the diamond anvil cell, I found out that UC Berkeley was a different place from Stanford. At Stanford when we worked with xrays, we wore government-issued xray badges on our shirts and an xray ring badge on one finger of our dominant hand. Once a week we’d turn them in for analysis, just to make sure we hadn’t been exposed. We shrouded every experiment with lead shields and kept the hell away while the xrays were on.

These were hard xrays, not like the soft xrays you get at the hospital to check if any bones are broken after you fall off your bike because a fence jumped in the way and you were smote. No, these xrays were serious business. Could cause cell mutations and cancer and lack of getting your thesis done.

So El and Queue showed me how to insert Germy between the points of the two diamonds, and crank up the pressure to, we hoped, squish him into shape. The key step now was to shoot xrays through him to see if he had changed into gold medal material.

So they showed me how to line up the xray beam, to make sure it was going straight through diamond one, then Germy, and then straight through diamond two to deliver the answer onto the xray film. They lined up the xray beam by removing the lead shield, turning the xrays on, and sticking their hands into the apparatus to get it just right. With a live xray beam.

Their fingers were covered with raised red burns, and scars from years of burns.

The prissy Stanford girl from across the Bay—that’s me—said, Um, aren’t you getting exposed to the xrays? What happens to your xray badges at the end of the week?

They looked at each other and had the good grace not to roll their two sets of eyes at the fancy privileged Stanford girl.

We keep our badges in the drawer across the lab, they said. Otherwise the state would be all over us. They’d shut down our lab.

Right.

So I told El and Queue that I’d take it from there, and made a show of scribbling in my notebook, waiting until they left the lab to make out or work on their own experiments or whatever they did. Then I’d double-check that the xray maker was off, take my safety badges out of the drawer, clip one to my shirt and slip the other on my finger, Stanford-style, remove the lead shield, do my best to align the apparatus, put the lead shield back in place, turn the xrays on, expose the film, turn the xrays off, remove the shield, check the results. At the end of the day I’d put my badges back in the drawer. Where they would remain unexposed, just like everyone else's.

I’m convinced this is the reason my son, Max, doesn’t have two heads and an ear where his nose should be.

El and Queue never asked why it took me so freakin long to align the apparatus. Instead the four of us, El, Queue, RayJay and I would go out for drinks and dinner at the end of the day, exploring some great restaurant or other in Berkeley or Oakland. RayJay treated us. He had family money somehow. Maybe his parents died young of xray-related diseases.

This went on for a year. A very good year. I found camaraderie with El, Queue and RayJay that I didn’t have in my group of fancy people across the Bay at Stanford. Maybe I was really one of them, scrappy underneath the skin, despite my ridiculous, secret xray precautions.

About nine months in, I got some tentatively exciting results. The xray film maybe showed that a small fraction of Germy had perhaps changed into the right structure which might mean it was a superconductor. The data was a little fuzzy, because the sought-after, hoped-for superconductor structure was pretty doggone similar to diamond structure, and you had two big fat perfect diamonds shouting their strong xray patterns, doing their best to conceal the tiny whisper from Germy. Still, there was a faint gray shadow on the film where the gold medal winner was predicted to produce a peak.

I flicked Germy into the tiniest test tube you’ve never seen, and took him back across the Bay to measure his performance. During the BART ride and the drive across the bridge, I concentrated on him, willing him not to relapse into his relaxed, three teaspoons of this, one teaspoon of that, natural non-superconductor state.

Back at Stanford, I think just maybe there was a tiny-tiny humplette at nineteen degrees kay on the side of the temperature curve that, if you squinted hard enough and wrote a persuasive enough argument, could get you a shot at the gold medal in the Superconductor Olympics. Even though Germy was ninety-nine percent pre-Olympic Germy, there just might have been an iota of superconductor in him. A grain within a barely-visible particle. A slim bit of hope was all I needed. I was ready to start writing my thesis. Heck, I was going to make the most of this fly speck with the shadow on his xray film and the barely detectable bump in his temperature curve.

Surely pee-aitch-dees have been awarded for less. A lot of people have pee-aitch-dees.

I got out my pen and a yellow legal pad and started writing Chapter One. Just kidding! I had a Mac II computer, and I started typing merrily.

A week later, the University of Texas announced an entirely new kind of superconductor that blasted Tinny, Germy and all other similar contenders, real or imaginary, not only off the platform, but out of the stadium. Heck, out of the county.

This new superconductor's transition temperature was a balmy eighty-something kay. Not only above the point where any device built from it would need highly impractical, pain-in-the-trump liquid helium to operate, but even above liquid nitrogen temperature. This made it merely very impractical.

Around the world, half a dozen people rejoiced on the outside, and possibly despaired on the inside because their research was now useless. Meanwhile an entire bottle of champagne was passed around the newly world-famous lab in Texas.

Amazingly enough, the Texas superconductor was the same structure as some other interesting compounds that are found naturally...guess where? In the core of the earth. It’s called perovskite structure. I am not making that up.

My advisor called me into his office and said, Our whole lab is now focused on reproducing the University of Texas result. We will work on this new class of superconductors from now on. I was in my fourth year of graduate school and I had to start a new thesis project.

The whole Germy drama wasn’t all bad, though. After all, I’ve wasted a year of my life doing less productive things. Last year I rode my bike and hiked and played pickleball. The year of Germy I’d studied music and read the New Yorker on the BART, gotten to know some excellent people at UC Berkeley, and eaten Ethiopian food for the first time.

[Graphics creds: Top sparkly gif found on a site called Bold Business, whoever they are. I made Figure 1, just for the fun of this story. It looks like a real illustration, doesn't it? Rather proud of it, I am.]