Nucleation and growth of oriented diamond on Si(100) by bias-assisted chemical vapor deposition

In order to clarify the effect of bias treatments on the highly oriented growth of diamond, we investigated the relation between the silicon surface morphology changes after applying a bias voltage, and the orientation of the diamond crystallites after growth. We report two major findings. First, a textured structure on the Si surface after the bias pretreatment was found to be a necessary but insufficient indicator for the subsequent growth of highly oriented diamond. Second, although bias pretreatments effectively enhance nucleation, we did not find a clear relationship between the nucleation density and the percentage of oriented crystallites. The highest nucleation densities resulted in randomly oriented films. We conclude that bias pretreatments affect the nucleation enhancement and the diamond orientation through different mechanisms.