Large-scale Fabrication of High-Density Silicon-vacancy Centers via Helium-ion Implantation of Diamond Nucleation Surface

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, cost-effective method for fabricating high-density silicon-vacancy centers in polycrystalline diamond films on silicon wafers, enabling potential large-scale optical sensing and bio-imaging applications.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel helium-ion implantation technique combined with thermal annealing to efficiently create high-density SiV- centers in wafer-scale polycrystalline diamonds, with controllable patterning.

Findings

High-density SiV- centers achieved in polycrystalline diamond.

Bright emission with long fluorescence lifetime (~1.08 ns).

Density and patterning control demonstrated via helium fluence variation.

Abstract

Silicon-vacancy (SiV) color centers in diamond have great potential for optical sensing and bio-imaging applications. However, the fabrication of large-scale high-density SiV centers in diamond remains difficult. Here, we report a promising method for the fabrication of high-density SiV- centers in a low-cost polycrystalline diamond film grown on an inches-scale Si wafer. Our method utilizes the nucleation surface of the diamond film which initially interfaces with the Si wafer. Benefited from the diamond seeding substrate of silicon, the nucleation surface has originally been incorporated with high-density Si atoms. Upon helium-ion implantation and subsequent thermal annealing, we demonstrate by performing PL mapping that these Si atoms can be efficiently converted to SiV- centers. The SiV- centers exhibit bright emission and a relatively long fluorescence lifetime (~1.08 ns) that is comparable to the SiV- lifetime reported in single-crystal diamonds. Furthermore, by using a focused helium beam and varying the helium fluence, we demonstrate the feasible density control and patterning of the SiV- centers. These results show that our method can produce high-density SiV- centers in low-cost wafer-scale polycrystalline diamonds, which could facilitate the commercialization of SiV- centers-based optical devices.