Nitrogen in Diamond

Abstract

Nitrogen is ubiquitous in both natural and laboratory-grown diamond, but the number and nature of the nitrogen-containing defects can have a profound effect on the diamond material and its properties. An ever-growing fraction of the supply of diamond appearing on the world market is now lab-grown. Here, we survey recent progress in two complementary diamond synthesis methodshigh pressure high temperature (HPHT) growth and chemical vapour deposition (CVD), how each is allowing ever more precise control of nitrogen incorporation in the resulting diamond, and how the diamond produced by either method can be further processed (e.g. by implantation and/or annealing) to achieve a particular outcome or property. The burgeoning availability of diamond samples grown under well-defined conditions has also enabled huge advances in the characterization and understanding of nitrogen-containing defects in diamondalone, and in association with vacancies, hydrogen and transition metal atoms. Amongst these, the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV −) defect in diamond is attracting particular current interest on account of the many new and exciting opportunities it offers for, e.g., quantum technologies, nanoscale magnetometry and biosensing. 2 Laboratory Based Synthesis of Diamond and Nitrogen-Containing Diamond 2.1 High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) Methods. Nature was the inspiration for the HPHT method, by which diamond growth was demonstrated by Swedish company ASEA in 1953 (though not reported at that time) and subsequently by US company General Electric in 1955. 14 , 15 Most present-day HPHT synthesis exploits the temperature-gradient growth (TGG) method developed later in that decade. 16 However, it took many further years before the design and control of HPHT reactors yielded diamonds of

Diamond with nitrogen: states, control, and applications

“…Type-I diamond can be divided into Type-Ia (with aggregated nitrogen) and Type-Ib (with isolated nitrogen). Type-II diamond can be divided into Type-IIa (very pure high quality) and Type-IIb (containing boron impurities) [7,9,10]. As presented in Figure 1, natural diamonds often show colors that correlate to their diamond types resulting from the listed characteristics, and now it also has been transferred to treated natural or treated synthetics stones.…”

“…Nitrogen in diamond has many aggregation states and would be combined with defects such as other substitutional atoms, vacancies, and clusters to form a variety of optical centers which would change the absorption band and give coloration of diamond crystal [10]. The color of diamond is associated with the concentration and the aggregation state of those centers.…”

“…Or the spin tunneling of some nitrogen-related optical centers promisingly provide good quantum bits and logic gates for quantum computer [13]. Among these color centers, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) is an important physical system for strongly boosting quantum technologies, including quantum metrology, information processing and communications, biological marking and imaging, or the tests of quantum entanglement [10,14,15]. Concurrently, advanced progress such as nitrogen termination and near-surface shallow NV mutually have been promoted by the extensive boost of NV quantum utilization [16].…”

The fabrication of nanodiamond doped tellurite germanate glass with robust structure and its luminescence

“…One is to efficiently generate NV centers by irradiating diamond with high‐energy particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.) to create vacancies, and then performing high‐temperature annealing in vacuum for the vacancies migrating towards nitrogen impurities 10,11 . This most commonly used method is suitable for diamonds containing enough nitrogen impurities inside.…”

“…to create vacancies, and then performing high-temperature annealing in vacuum for the vacancies migrating towards nitrogen impurities. 10,11 This most commonly used method is suitable for diamonds containing enough nitrogen impurities inside. However, this method has disadvantage of high equipment costs, time-consuming operation, and some undesired results, such as electron spin resonance shift and line-width broadening, induced by the high-energy irradiation procedure.…”