Nana Siaw-Mensah: The ghost of diamonds – a lesson in iron and illusion

This piece was written in the spring of 2025 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Nana Siaw-Mensah as part of an assignment to write a personal narrative about his research.

I’ve always been the kind of person who believes that if you throw enough energy at a problem, it’ll crack open and spill its secrets. My friends call me “the powder guy” — partly for my obsession with materials and carbon, partly for my stubbornness. I’m the one who spends nights arguing with a furnace and graphs, convinced that this time my experiment will yield useful data. The lab is my monastery.

    At the time of this story, I wanted to prove that iron could coax carbon into becoming diamond. The obstacles? A deserted lab, the seductive lies of data, and my own hunger for a eureka moment. 

    The lab smelled like argon, heating elements, and the sharp sting of nital etchant, a combination of nitric acid and alcohol. I’d spent weeks milling iron and graphite, convinced the high energy collisions would spark a metamorphosis. After sintering — applying pressure and heat to form the two materials into a solid mass — I dipped the sample in nital, watching as the surface was etched into a constellation of triangular shiny pores. My breath hitched as my sample surface began to look like it was covered with nanosized diamonds.

    Under the scanning electron microscope (SEM), the pores glittered like alien hieroglyphs. I ran an Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy scan: carbon spikes, iron shadows. “It’s happening!” I told the empty room, as if my old lab mate Tristan might materialize to share the triumph. Yet another test, the Raman scan, sealed it — a peak at 1332 cm⁻¹, diamond’s fingerprint. 

    I emailed my advisor: “Possible success. Need verification.” 

    Days later, I tilted the SEM stage. The “triangles” I had seen warped into squares — etch pits, not diamond indentations. Nital had simply sculpted the iron; the "diamonds" were a mirage. The Raman peak? A cruel overlap: Iron oxide’s signal mimicked that of diamond, and I had leapt to the conclusion I was hoping for. I slumped into my chair, the silence louder than ever.

    Humiliation, with a dash of irony. I imagined Tristan’s voice, dry and teasing: “You’ve invented… rust. Congrats.” I laughed, sharp and hollow. Even the universe was trolling me. 

    I stared at the Raman graph, its peaks mocking me. Iron oxide. Not diamond. But then I realized that if creating diamonds was that easy, someone else somewhere would have figured it out. 

    I never made diamonds. But those etch pits — those beautiful, lying etch pits on the surface of the iron I imagined might be diamond — taught me that failure isn’t a dead end. It’s a detour to a discovery you didn’t know to chase. 

    Now, when new students ask about my research, I show them the “diamond” sample. “This,” I say, “is why you trust the process, not the mirage. Sometimes the answer isn’t in what you find — it’s in what you stumble over.”