Optical Sapphire Discs, Cores and Wafers

Optical Sapphire Discs, Cores and WafersThese are cores and wafers of colorless optical sapphire grown by Rubicon, one of the top US growers of sapphire, and purchased from a factory closing auction. These are a mixture of rejected material (likely for surface chips or maybe minor optical misalignments) and cores wafers that just didn't get used before the factory closed. These were grown for use in high end optics and as a substrate to grow bespoke computer chips on. These can of course be

1x 100 grit lap for extra-coarse roughing

It was mostly used as a diamond simulant but it really doesn't work well for that simply because it's brighter and more dispersive than a diamond

The base has some opaque layering which might be why it was left as a crystal

The jig accommodates stones up to 42mm in diameter

with flashes of green and gold

The best rubies are individually numbered and come with a signed

Note its hardness is 5

producing my largest rubies to this point--the largest was 4

but be aware that these are more cube-ish than geometric perfect cubes

larger than a hen's egg and about the size of a duck egg

though it would be great in a pendant or earrings

a type of hyperfluorescent lab created garnet produced for use as scintillators in PET scanners