• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.17-21
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• 2003

It has been difficult to characterize the value of treated sapphires for gem stones with bare eyes. Color enhancing treatments by diffusion and annealing became sophisticated and customers and gemologists had asked a non-destructive and fast characterization method. We suggest that Fourier transformation infra-red (FTIR) offers to characterize the cobalt-doped synthetic sapphires successfully in 3 minutes. Our results imply that FTIR may be employed in jewelry business to identify the treated sapphires in quantitative way.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.105-109
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• 2005

We heat treated pure sapphire samples at $1800^{\circ}C{\sim}100$ hours in BeO-${Al_2}{O_3}$ powder by varying BeO contents of $5{\sim}50\;wt%$ in order to quantify the BeO diffusion enhancement for corundum gem stones. We investigated the heat treated samples with visual evaluation, color coordination analysis, and surface roughness measurement. We confirmed that $Be^{2+}$ ions did not lead to orange color but to dark gray. The lightness in CIE Lab index decreased while surface roughness increased rapidly as BeO contents increased. We propose that BeO yellow color enhancement may be feasible only for $Fe^{3+}$ rich blue sapphires and sub-5% BeO content be appropriate to shorten post re- cutting process.