Diamond-like carbon film from camphor soot

Diamond-like carbon film (DLC) has been deposited from the soot of camphor, a natural source, by a simple vacuum deposition technique, for the first time. This method of deposition is simple, convenient and much faster than the conventional gas cracking technique usually adopted for the DLC film deposition. DLC thin film is characterized by Raman, FTIR, solid state C-13 NMR, ESR and SEM. Preliminary results (XRD and SEM analyses) suggest that the polycrystalline diamond film may also be obtained from this source. The prime novelty of this work is that from the same source, we have been able to synthesize both DLC film as well as polycrystalline diamond film by a simple vacuum deposition technique without using any external gas like the conventional chemical vapour deposition (CVD) methods.