Diamond & Quantum Weekly | Sep 28–Oct 4, 2026

The reporting window runs from 00:00 Beijing time on September 28 to 23:59 on October 4, 2026.

Weekly signal

This was a high-noise holiday window with relatively few real changes in industrial status.

The development worth retaining on the diamond-industry side was an industry survey from Xinhua Finance. It argued that China has substantial synthetic-diamond output and supply-chain scale, while low-end price competition remains visible and high-value processing, branding, design and functional applications remain weak. This provides a useful counterweight to the expansion, project and “customer introduction” narratives that have appeared densely over the past few months.

The week also requires noise reduction. Worldia’s September 28 institutional-investor briefing was a real disclosure, but the widely repeated figures—320 × 320 mm, 300 mm polycrystalline diamond, 60 × 60 mm single-crystal diamond, TTV below 2 μm and Ra below 1 nm or 0.5 nm—had already appeared in the company’s interim report and July investor briefing. No new status change large enough to alter the commercialization assessment emerged this week.

The quantum track likewise saw no new industrial-stage transition. Element Six continued at Quantum World Congress to position diamond as a quantum-materials platform, but its core wafer-scale achievements had already been disclosed.

1. Xinhua Finance: capacity is not enough; high-value segments remain weak

On September 30, Xinhua Finance published an industry survey titled “Synthetic diamond industry caught in low-end competition; high-value segments remain weak.” It reviewed price pressure in both gem-quality and industrial diamond and pointed to processing, branding, design, standards and functional applications as the higher-value segments that still need to develop.

The new point this week is that this was a relatively authoritative media survey providing a restrained industry-background assessment.

The boundary also matters. The report repeated specific claims involving NVIDIA Vera Rubin, Huawei chip cooling and Huanghe Whirlwind customer qualification. The corresponding first-party sources have not yet been closed, so this weekly brief does not adopt those customer claims as verified facts.

2. NV sensing: an all-fiber probe images a two-dimensional microwave field

On October 1, Measurement published a paper from a Chinese research team proposing microwave-field imaging based on amplitude modulation and an all-fiber NV sensor. The system achieved approximately 1 mm spatial resolution, 1.52 nT/√Hz magnetic sensitivity and 0.35% measurement accuracy, and completed two-dimensional near-field imaging of a ring-patch antenna.

This is the week’s newly published NV engineering-measurement paper.

It does not set a new “ultimate sensitivity” record. Its value is closer to an engineering question: how to make an NV probe more portable and measure the microwave field across an antenna surface in a real configuration.

For NV technology moving from experimental apparatus toward a repeatable measurement tool, this type of work is worth tracking.

CVD diamond and MPCVD

No MPCVD or CVD-diamond event this week was strong enough to be upgraded to an industrial-status transition.

Worldia’s September 28 investor briefing again confirmed directions including large-area composite substrates, ultra-flat single-crystal and polycrystalline heat-spreader plates and customer validation. But the key dimensions and TTV/Ra figures had been disclosed earlier. The company continues to describe the business as being in an early market-expansion stage, with limited effect on current performance.

Quantum technology

In addition to the October 1 NV microwave-field imaging paper, two research developments are worth retaining in the full record.

• On September 29, a team including EPFL researchers submitted a preprint reporting all-optical modulation and long-lived tuning in a suspended diamond Fabry–Perot nanobeam cavity containing NV centers. The maximum resonance blue shift was 3.15 nm, or 0.87 THz. It remains a preprint.
• On September 30, Yamakawa, Oshimi and Arai submitted a preprint proposing a geometric method for estimating the photoluminescence contributions of NV0 and NV− from low-dimensional spectral representations. This is a methodological increment in measurement.

International social media also circulated earlier work on SiV heterogeneous photonic integration, room-temperature parallel four-qubit NV entanglement and the Fujitsu SnV prototype. Those original events fall outside this reporting window and are not counted again.

Conferences and industry activity

October 14–16 | Guilin, Guangxi

The 18th Chinese Symposium on Diamond-Related Materials and Applications will be held alongside the 2026 International Conference on Innovative Diamond Applications. The agenda covers CVD diamond growth, functional applications, semiconductors, quantum technology, thermal management and precision processing.

Social-media observation

The information gain from international social media was weak this week. Most items were recirculated papers or routine product promotion, with no new high-confidence industrial trend.

The domestic information environment showed another issue worth watching: customer names, order values, yield and price figures are becoming increasingly specific, but many still cannot be traced to company announcements, customer websites or papers. These items were downgraded or excluded rather than treated as more credible simply because the numbers looked precise.

What to watch next

1. Whether claims in brokerage notes about Worldia increasing its MPCVD fleet to 2,000 tools in 2027, production timing and prices can be closed to first-party company disclosures.
2. Whether the recent wave of diamond-cooling claims about customer qualification, BOM inclusion and volume supply gains customer-side or formal-announcement evidence.
3. Whether the October 14–16 Guilin conference releases new hard data on large-area MPCVD, thermal management or diamond semiconductors.

Main sources

• Xinhua Finance, September 30, 2026: “Synthetic diamond industry caught in low-end competition; high-value segments remain weak”
• Elsevier, Measurement, October 1, 2026: “The imaging of microwave field based on amplitude modulation and an all-fiber sensor using the NV centers in diamond”
• arXiv:2609.37163, submitted September 29, 2026: “Optically-Induced Modulation and Programming of Diamond Photonic Cavities”
• Worldia’s 2026 interim report and public July investor-briefing materials
• Official notice for the 18th Chinese Symposium on Diamond-Related Materials and Applications and the 2026 International Conference on Innovative Diamond Applications