Nickel doping of nitrogen enriched CVD‐diamond for the production of single photon emitters

Abstract

Chemical vapour deposition has been utilised for the fabrication of nickel-nitrogen defects in diamond. By introducing nickel, as well as nitrogen into the process gas, this approach offers the advantage, that a direct formation of nickel-nitrogen centres on the growing surface is possible. This could therefore make postannealing steps superfluous. Nanocrystalline diamond films, as well as single crystal layers were grown under addition of nickel and nitrogen using different doping sources, namely: gaseous nickelocene, nickel powder and nickel wire. The amount of nickel present in the gas phase was characterised by optical emission spectroscopy (OES). In order to investigate the presence of nickel or nickel-nitrogen-related defects, photoluminescence (PL) measurements at different temperatures have been applied. A strong fluorescence in the range between 800 and 900 nm, accompanied by a peak at around 817 nm, as well as a narrow peak at 788 nm has been observed at cryogenic temperatures (10 K). The peak at 788 nm indicates the presence of nickel and nickel-nitrogen-related complexes in our samples. PL measurements at higher temperatures reveal, an initially rising intensity of a broad emission band at temperatures up to 200 K, while the emission is quenched at 300 K

Diamond Nanophotonics

“…Nickel ions have successfully been incorporated into diamond using ion implantation [67] as well as doping during diamond growth [68] . A multitude of color centers containing nickel is known, especially in nitrogen rich high pressure high temperature (HPHT) diamond, where nickel is used as a catalyst and forms several complexes with nitrogen [69] .…”

“…Reports on lifetime (2 and 11.2 ns) and phonon coupling are ambiguous (70% emission in ZPL in [70] , 1% in [33] ). Creating NE8 centers remains challenging: ion implantation and highpressure high-temperature annealing did not yield NE8 centers [67] ; recent attempts incorporating nickel into single crystal diamond during CVD only produced ensembles but no single centers [68] . Nickel-silicon-complexes (ZPL 767-775 nm) [73] and other nickel related defects, the latter formed during CVD were investigated and showed bright, narrow emission [73][74][75] .…”

Investigation of nickel lattice sites in diamond: Density functional theory and x-ray absorption near-edge structure experiments

“…To our knowledge, the only transition metals in this category are Co 8 and Ni. 7,14 Co has been tentatively suggested as a dopant in diamond seen as a new diluted magnetic semiconductor for spintronics. [15][16][17] Ni in diamond has been frequently proposed as a single photon source for quantum cryptography, [10][11][12][13]18 as well as a deep trap for radiation dosimetry 19,20 or a pulsed magnetic field calibration probe.…”

Novel Single Photon Emitters Based on Color Centers in Diamond

“…Previously demonstrated techniques to incorporate nickel into CVD diamond films included seeding the substrate with slurry containing nanodiamonds and nickel powder [27] or a more recent report of incorporation of nickel through a gas phase during a CVD growth using an evaporated nickelocene [203]. These techniques however did not allow a controlled formation of the nickel centers in a specific diamond crystal or in a preferred location.…”