Question: Could you explain more about what happened to your engagement ring?

Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 20 Mar 2014:

Sure. I put my engagement ring in a single crystal diffractometer, and what happened next was an x-ray beam hit the diamond (phew! not the metal! could have overheated – argh!) and interacted with the crystal.

When this happens the best way to imagine it is layers of flat surfaces and the x-rays will hit one and be partly reflected and partly go through and then partly reflect off and partly go through the next and so on (depending where atoms are on these planes). Two beams coming off different layers overlap. Light waves then eitehr add up to make a more intense beam or take away from each other, depending on whether the up part of a wave meets another up or a down. This gives a series of light and dark spots in the diffraction pattern and where the dark spots are tells us where atoms sit.

So when I put my diamond in the diffractomer I was given an atomic MAP as the output, which is really cool because it is about as close as we can get with our eyes to actually get inside a crystal and looking at it from there. 🙂