2024/09/11 by Ricardo Vidrio, Cesar Saucedo, Vidrio, Ricardo +11
Engineering · Materials Science · #Advanced Materials Characterization Techniques #Diamond and Carbon-based Materials Research #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Metal and Thin Film Mechanics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.06934
openalex publication_date 2024/09/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Oxygen-terminated diamond has a wide breadth of applications, which include stabilizing near-surface color centers, semiconductor devices, and biological sensors. Despite the vast literature on characterizing functionalization groups on diamond, the chemical composition on the shallowest portion of the surface (< 1 nm) is challenging to probe with conventional techniques like XPS and FTIR. In this work, we demonstrate the use of angle-resolved XPS to probe the first ten nanometers of (100) single-crystalline diamond, showing the changes of the oxygen functional groups and the allotropes of carbon with respect to depth. With the use of consistent peak-fitting methods, the peak identities and relative peak binding energies were identified for sp2 carbon, ether, hydroxyl, carbonyl, and C-H groups. For the oxygen-terminated sample, we also quantified the thickness of the sp2 carbon layer situated on top of the bulk sp3 diamond bonded carbon to be 0.4 ± 0.1 nm, based on the analysis of the Auger electron spectra and D-parameter calculations. These results indicate that the majority of the oxygen is bonded to the sp2 carbon layer on the diamond, and not directly on the sp3 diamond bonded carbon.