Mexican Tequila into Diamonds!

This is as heady as it possibly gets!!

A team of Mexican scientists found that the heated vapor from 80-proof (40% alcohol) tequila blanco, when deposited on a silicon or stainless steel substrate, can form diamond films.  The main reason for this to happen is  tequila’s ratio of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, which lies within the “diamond growth region.”

So, there you go.. get drunk… and use the leftovers to give your wife a gift she craves for.. Diamond!  Yeah Yeah.. it will be just a film.. but just put it all over something useful… and make her happy!  🙂

“To dissipate any doubts, one morning on the way to the lab I bought a pocket-size bottle of cheap white tequila and we did some tests,” Apátiga said. “We were in doubt over whether the great amount of chemicals present in tequila, other than water and ethanol, would contaminate or obstruct the process, it turned out to be not so. The results were amazing, same as with the ethanol and water compound, we obtained almost spherical shaped diamonds of nanometric size. There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds.”

In their experiments, the scientists grew the diamond films using “pulsed liquid injection chemical vapor deposition techniques.” In a specially made device, they heated the liquid tequila to 280 ºC (536 ºF) to transform it into a gas. In a reaction chamber, they heated the gas to 800 ºC (1470 ºF) to break down its molecular structure, resulting in solid diamond crystals of about 100-400 nm. The crystals fell onto silicon or stainless steel trays, accumulating in a thin, uniform film. The high temperatures removed all of the tequila´s carbon impurities to result in pure diamonds.