Can anything dissolve a diamond?

Question

i heard that coke can dissolve a diamond

Answer 1

put the diamond in HCL (hyrdochloric acid) and turn up the heat and watch the diamond melt

Answer 2

Molten Sodium Hydroxide + Sodium Nitrate at 400 degrees C might do a fair job of slowly dissolving diamonds completely. When done, you would have some sodium carbonate in the melt.  Lots of molten metals do it, but they are all hotter than that. Molten iron is fast, but it is 1500C. [1]

The amount of heat and pressure which forms a diamond is what exists in the outer and inner core of the Earth's dynamo.

Answer 3

No water based room temperature liquid can dissolve a diamond.

Answer 4

No, Coke will not dissolve a diamond.  

Pure, elemental brown liquid Bromine (Br2) comes close, but probably does not do it at room temperature.

Even chlorine gas liquefied by pressure might not.

Fluorine gas pressurized  to 10 atmospheres could burn it with an intense white flame,

but until the flame was ignited, the diamond would not dissolve.

Whether a reaction occurs or stalls might actually depend on subtleties like the color of the diamond,

or more precisely, its impurities and electrical carrier type.

Yellowish Nitrogen-doped N-type diamonds might require a slightly higher temperature to start to dissolve

than boron-doped P-type diamonds, when one is using an oxidizing chemical to dissolve it.

Oxygen and Fluorine are oxidizers, liquid sodium is a reducer, and the HCL in stomach acid would be attempting

a mixed reduction-oxidation reaction, which works well enough on some crystals.

Molten Sodium Hydroxide + Sodium Nitrate at 400 degrees C might do a fair job of slowly dissolving diamonds completely.

When done, you would have some sodium carbonate in the melt.

Lots of molten metals do it, but they are all hotter than that.

Molten iron is fast, but it is 1500C.  (The melting point of diamond is 3550C, so I, the answerer, dispute this statement.)

I have had no real experience dissolving diamonds.

The temperature thresholds I described might be lower or higher than the reality.

But it gives you the appropriate perspective that etching at room temperature is not likely for diamonds.

I don't necessarily believe that these things would do it and the person who wrote what I have copied here said that he had no experience in dissolving diamonds.

Abstract  The infiltration behaviour of molten cobalt into a diamond powder compact was examined when the latter was placed on a cobalt disc and held at high pressure of 5.8 GPa and high temperature of 1350 to 1500° C. The larger the grain size of the starting diamond powder and the higher the holding temperature, the more easily cobalt infiltrated into the diamond compact. The infiltration is considered to occur because of the negative pressure in the voids formed between diamond grains. Although diamond powder was consolidated in this process of cobalt infiltration, abnormal grain growth was also observed in the boundary between cobalt and diamond compact because of the dissolution and precipitation process of the compact into molten cobalt.

It seems that you would need some really intense temperature and pressure to destroy a diamond.

Answer 5

Perhaps oxygen and some heat.