Surface conductivity on hydrogenated diamond

Diamond has many extreme properties that make it an ideal candidate for high performance electronics devices. Unfortunately, due to the high density of the diamond lattice it is difficult to dope, and to date very little success has been achieved in this field with the exception of boron. However, even boron has a very deep activation energy (0.37 eV), which corresponds to less that 1% of acceptors being activated at room temperature. Hydrogen surface conductivity is a method of rendering an undoped diamond surface highly conductive. A brief hydrogen plasma exposure can generate a high density of holes in the near surface, with extremely low activation energy. This layer has been used to fabricate devices such as Schottky diodes. MESFETs and Single Hole Transistors. The work in this thesis concentrates on the electrical characterisation of this layer, techniques include the hall effect over a wide range of temperatures (10-500K), conductivity and I/V device testing. This data is compared with the literature and the various proposed models are addressed