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Abstract
Building on previous work6-8, Breeze and colleagues used a millimetre-scale diamond as the gain medium for their maser (Fig. 1a). Because it is composed of carbon atoms, diamond would be expected to have long spin lifetimes. Thanks to diamonds high thermal conductivity (10,000 times higher than that of p-terphenyl), the temperature of the gain medium increased by only 35 °C when the pump power was raised to 400 mW At room temperature, the maser worked continuously for up to 10 hours without noticeable degradation in power. Because the frequency of microwaves produced by masers is highly stable, these devices have applications in time-keeping, high-precision spectroscopy and microwave amplification for deep-space communication and for the detection of astronomical objects. [...]Breeze and colleagues' maser could provide a platform for studying quantum many-body physics.