Roman Kolesov

gave a talk in our department on Jan. 25. His research mostly concerns optical and paramagnetic excitation of impurity ions in transparent crystals like ruby or diamond (these ions determine colors of precious stones). It is an active research area with a nano-twist: people are trying to make nanoparticles out of the crystals so that there is a single ion per nanoparticle, position the particles,  connect them optically using metal strips, or put them into an artificial crystal (of nanometer period) that could provide localization of the photons emitted by the ion.

Several groups are (hyper)active in the area. Roman belongs to Jelezko team of TU Dresden. Roland Hanson, our yongest faculty, stands under banner of diamond quantum physics here at TU Delft.

Precisios stones fascinate and, reportedly, could even enslave your mind. As you know, there is a small nuclear reactor at TU. There were (and are) projects to make a commercial use of this rather unique facility. One of the projects was to change the color of precious stones by exposing them to radiation: sometimes a color change can change the market value of a stone by an order of magnitude (I mean, increase this value). Somehow this project did not go: was that because the diamonds shone too much after the exposure? 

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