Synthetic diamond firm Element Six is producing material for quantum computing.
"As the potential to apply the theory of quantum mechanics in practical applications such as computing and cryptography moves closer, the need for a high purity material becomes paramount," said the company.
"Element Six, along with researchers at the universities of Paris and Stuttgart, has made significant progress in the development of diamond suitable for the realisation of quantum computers capable of operating at room temperature."
Practical quantum devices need quantum bits (qubits) durable enough to allow a computation to be made - lasting at least 105 computational operations, according to Element Six. And in diamond it is defects with paramagnetic spin that can shorten the life of qubits, and therefore coherence time.
It has developed a CVD-based synthesis processes that can produce pure isotopically controlled single crystal diamond claimed to have a "remarkably low" concentration of paramagnetic impurities which has allowed single electron spins to have a room temperature spin de-phasing time of 1.8ms, claimed to be the longest ever observed in a solid state system at room temperature.
"For quantum applications, Element Six has been faced with the challenge of simultaneously reducing the concentration of the isotope 13C to less than 0.3%, and reducing the concentration of other paramagnetic defects to less than 1014/cm3," said Element Six researcher Daniel Twitchen.
"This isotopically engineered diamond is essentially the first quantum grade purity diamond ever produced and marks a milestone for synthetic diamond produced by a CVD process."
The research is part of a three-year project called Engineered Quantum Information in Nanostructured Diamond (EQUIND).
Started in early 2007, EQUIND is EU-funded and aims to establish whether specific optical features identified in diamond can be used as the basic elements for quantum computers and single-photon sources.
The work has been published as a letter in Nature Materials which hints at further uses.
In 'Ultra long spin coherence time in isotopically engineered diamond', the researchers note: "The ability of ultrapure isotopically controlled CVD diamond to detect weak magnetic fields with high local resolution might have implications in a wide range of fields such as: life science, metrology and quantum applications. A possible example are diamond magnetometers used to detect magnetic fields associated with the ion flow through membrane channels in cells."
EQUIND is co-ordinated by the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan in France and alongside Element Six includes: the Universities of Bristol, Warwick, Stuttgart, Kiel and Melbourne, and the Academy of Science in Belarus.