Effects of electric field on the growth of diamond by microwave plasma CVD

Studies on nucleation process in diamond CVD: an overview of recent developments

“…This is supported by many growth experiments of diamond particles or films on Si substrates in HFCVD and MW PACVD [12,14,23,28,29,40,62,[65][66][67], which showed that the Si surface is indeed transformed to SiC under conditions leading to diamond growth, and diamond nucleation occurs on the SiC intermediate layer. A recent AFM study [25] provided further evidence for the formation of SiC.…”

“…Volmer-Weber 3-D island growth [58] is the mode of nucleation and growth of polycrystalline diamond films directly on non-diamond substrates due to the highest surface energies of diamond among any known materials (see Tables 3 and 4 Diamond nucleation on non-diamond substrates is generally proposed to occur mostly on an intermediate layer of diamond-like amorphous carbon [9][10][11]30,35,61], metal carbides [12,14,16,22,23,25,28,29,40,[62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70], or graphite [13,17,19,32,34,62,71] formed at the substrate surface due to chemical interactions between activated gas species and the surface during the incubation period. Such intermediate layers provide nucleation sites for diamond crystallite growth [9,17,70], and hence enhance diamond nucleation densities on non-diamond substrates [21,37,70,71] and offer an opportunity for controlling the morphology [21,37], orientation and texture [28,<...>…”

Deposition of Diamond-Like Superhard Materials in the B/C/N System

“…This holds for high energies [50] as well as for the energy range relevant to the deposition of c-BN [51,52]. If, for example, the bias-enhanced nucleation process mentioned above is terminated too late or carried out indefinitely, diamond layers of pure quality only result [52,53].…”

Frequency and Duty Cycle Dependence on the Pulsed Bias-Enhanced Nucleation of Highly Oriented Diamond on (100) Silicon

“…Although this is a profound challenge, recent advancements in this research area have been made including the ability of forming highly oriented diamond on b-SiC [1] and Si [2,3] based on the novel application of a substrate bias. Bias-enhanced nucleation (BEN) was not discovered in an attempt at obtaining diamond heteroeptixay, but rather to learn more about the relevant plasma constituents responsible for the nucleation and growth of low-pressure diamond [4]. As a consequence of the initial substrate biasing investigations, it was uncovered that the application of a negative potential applied to a pristine, single crystalline silicon substrate resulted in diamond epitaxy under optimized processing conditions.…”