Fullerenes as precursors for diamond film growth without hydrogen or oxygen additions

Abstract

Diamond films are predominantly grown using one percent or so of a hydrocarbon precursor in hydrogen gas. Hydrogen is generally believed to be necessary for the diamond thin film growth process. However, hydrogen in varying amounts is inevitably incorporated in the growing diamond lattice, leading to structural defects. The authors report here for the first time the successful growth of diamond films using fullerene precursors in an argon microwave plasma, a unique development achieved without the addition of hydrogen or oxygen. It is speculated that collisional fragmentation of C{sub 60} to give C{sub 2} could be responsible for the high growth rate of the very fine grained diamond films.