The occupied electronic structure of ultrathin boron doped diamond

A C Pakpour-Tabrizi; A K Schenk; A J U Holt; S K Mahatha; F Arnold; M Bianchi; R B Jackman; J E Butler; A Vikharev; J A Miwa; P Hofmann; S P Cooil; J W Wells; F Mazzola

doi:10.1039/c9na00593e

The occupied electronic structure of ultrathin boron doped diamond

Nanoscale Adv. 2020 Feb 24;2(3):1358-1364. doi: 10.1039/c9na00593e. eCollection 2020 Mar 17.

Authors

A C Pakpour-Tabrizi¹, A K Schenk², A J U Holt³, S K Mahatha³, F Arnold³, M Bianchi³, R B Jackman¹, J E Butler⁴, A Vikharev⁵, J A Miwa³, P Hofmann³, S P Cooil^{2

6}, J W Wells², F Mazzola²

Affiliations

¹ London Centre for Nanotechnology, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London 17-19 Gordon Street London WC1H 0AH UK.
² Center for Quantum Spintronics, Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology NO-7491 Trondheim Norway justin.wells@ntnu.no.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center, Aarhus University 8000 Aarhus C Denmark.
⁴ Cubic Carbon Ceramics 855 Carson Road Huntingtown MD 20639 USA.
⁵ Institute of Applied Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences 46 Ul'yanov Street Nizhny Novgorod 603950 Russia.
⁶ Department of Physics, Aberystwyth University Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ UK.

Abstract

Using angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy, we compare the electronic band structure of an ultrathin (1.8 nm) δ-layer of boron-doped diamond with a bulk-like boron doped diamond film (3 μm). Surprisingly, the measurements indicate that except for a small change in the effective mass, there is no significant difference between the electronic structure of these samples, irrespective of their physical dimensionality, except for a small modification of the effective mass. While this suggests that, at the current time, it is not possible to fabricate boron-doped diamond structures with quantum properties, it also means that nanoscale boron doped diamond structures can be fabricated which retain the classical electronic properties of bulk-doped diamond, without a need to consider the influence of quantum confinement.