Bumps on Diamonds That Nobody Liked Turn Out to Be Factories of Quantum Defects
Hot gas settles on a substrate, building up a transparent film layer by layer. But instead of a perfect mirror, the surface sometimes gets covered with tiny bumps, like frost patterns on glass in severe cold. Usually, people try to remove them because they get in the way of making smooth components. Physicists from Oxford and their colleagues did the opposite: they looked inside the bumps.