LAUSR

We report the synthesis of highly oriented diamond (HOD) (111) films on 3C-SiC/Si (111) substrates. Bias-enhanced nucleation (BEN) is a key process for the heteroepitaxial growth of HOD films. Conventional long nucleation periods have been found to lead to a polycrystalline diamond film on the 3C-SiC (111) surface. Here, we propose a method that combines brief BEN (<30 s), called pulse BEN, and epitaxial grain selection by oxidative etching. Smaller diamond nuclei with a higher spatial density on the substrate were formed by pulse BEN with a pulse duration of <30 s. We found that precisely controlling the pulse duration is important for obtaining a nucleation density that is sufficiently high to obtain the HOD films. By adding oxygen gas to the subsequent growth process, non-epitaxial nuclei were removed and epitaxial diamond grains selectively remained. There was no notable difference in the relative growth rate of [111] to [100] with and without oxygen, and the orientation improvement was observed on bo...