Highly-focused boron implantation in diamond and imaging using the nuclear reaction 11B(p, α)8Be

Diamond is an especially attractive material because of its gemological value as well as its unique mechanical, chemical and physical properties. One of these properties is that boron-doped diamond is an electrically p-type semiconducting material at practically any boron concentration. This property makes it possible to use diamonds for multiple industrial and technological applications. Boron can be incorporated into pure diamond by different techniques including ion implantation. Although typical energies used to dope diamond by ion implantation are about 100 keV, implantations have also been performed with energies above MeV. In this work CMAM microbeam setup has been used to demonstrate capability to implant boron with high energies. An 8 MeV boron beam with a size of about 5 × 3 μm2 and a beam current higher than 500 pA has been employed while controlling the beam position and fluence at all irradiated areas. The subsequent mapping of the implanted boron in diamond has been obtained using the strong and broad nuclear reaction 11B(p, α)8Be at Ep = 660 keV. This reaction has a high Q-value (8.59 MeV for α0 and 5.68 MeV for α1) and thus is almost interference-free. The sensitivity of the technique is studied in this work.