Natural diamonds, we discovered, would not produce an x-ray beam that met the stringent standards of the upcoming GlueX experiment.
What do you do when diamond just isn’t good enough?  Use sythetic diamond.  Over the past few years, Drukkers, a daughter company of DeBeers, has been developing a process to manufacture diamond of a quality even higher than natural diamond by depositing carbon vapor at high temperature and pressure.  Through a colleague at the University of Glasgow, we obtained several samples of this prototype synthetic diamond.  To determine if they were of sufficiently high quality, we subjected these samples to tests at the Synchroton Radiation Source in Daresbury, England.
Our tests, undertaken in collaboration with Drukkers, were the first of their kind for synthetic diamond.