Recent Advances on Diamond Surfaces and Devices

Abstract

Diamond represents a well-known gemstone and traditional industrial material in applications such as cutting and polishing. However, since about 20 years ago, diamond is rising as a new semiconductor material with many unique properties, unrivalled by other materials. Research and development during these years was initially focused on getting high quality, electronic grade diamond materials, possibly without defects and impurities. Nowadays, synthetic high quality diamonds for electronic application are reality and available commercially. Based on this tremendous progress in diamond technology many new fundamental phenomena have been and are being discovered and diamond is studied in diverse fields from nuclear physics and spintronics to biology and medicine. In this respect it is intriguing that originally unwanted defects and impurities have now become one of the key functional elements in diamond research and applications. This makes evident that diamond can bring surprises and shine bright even as a semiconductor. In this special issue of physica status solidi (a) we aim at bringing you refl ection of the most recent activity and advances in diamond science and technology, although without being able to be comprehensive in this already large and quickly developing field. To accomplish this aim, the issue is based on inviting several topical contributions from recognized scientists as well as on selection of papers that were actively contributed by authors worldwide. The articles come from Europe, Asia, and Australia and demonstrate truly intercontinental collaborations. The special issue is organized into fundamental and applied subjects such as growth, impurity and defect control, surface structuring of diamond, surface chemistry, electron emission and excitons in diamond and, of course, diamond devices. Note that while they represent their own research fields these subjects are also obviously interrelated. We would like to attract your attention in particular to the two Feature Articles in this issue. Kane M. O'Donnell and co-workers discuss a new way of generating the highly useful negative electron affinity and facilitate electron emission by merging diamond with lithium 1. Electron emission is indeed a crucial and intensively studied phenomenon in diamond, as shown by the article of I-Nan Lin and coworkers 2. It finds interest from chemistry and biology to power devices, in particular because of its use in applications benefiting our daily lives and contributing to our sustainable future. These and other collected articles show that the research and understanding of diamond and its surfaces is still far from finished and new discoveries may be just behind the corner. Therefore, we strived for an expedite peer-review and editorial process and we hope that you will find the presented works interesting, timely and inspirational. Prague & Hasselt, September 2014 Bohuslav Rezek Miloš Nesládek Ken Haenen