Electronic Properties of Diamond

Sammanfattning: Diamond is a semiconductor with many superior material properties such as high breakdown field, high saturation velocity, high carrier mobilities and the highest thermal conductivity of all materials. These extreme properties compared to other (wide bandgap) semiconductors make it desirable to develop single-crystalline epitaxial diamond films for many electronic device and detector applications. Future devices, such as power diodes, photoconductive switches and high-frequency field effect transistors, could in principle deliver outstanding performance due to diamond’s excellent intrinsic properties. However, such electronic applications put severe demands on the crystalline quality of the material.Unfortunately, many fundamental electronic properties of diamond are still poorly understood, which severely holds back diamond-based electronic device and detector development. Such uncertainties are largely due to an incomplete knowledge of the types and concentrations of defects present in the material and also due to a lack of understanding of the influence that these defects have on transport properties.The focus of this licentiate thesis is therefore the study of certain electronic properties of single-crystalline plasma-deposited (SC-CVD) diamond samples in order to gain more information about the charge creation and transport mechanisms. By measuring characteristics such as drift mobilities, saturation velocities, compensation ratios or average pair-creation energy and comparing them with theoretical predictions from simulations allows for verification of these models and improvement of the diamond growth process.