Electroless oxidation of diamond surfaces in ceric and ferricyanide solutions: An easy way to produce “C–O” functional groups

Despite many works are devoted to oxidation of diamond surfaces, it is still a challenge, to successfully produce well defined “C–O” functions, particularly for functionalization purposes. In this paper we describe and compare, for the first time, the “electroless” oxidation of as-deposited polycrystalline boron-doped diamond (BDD) films in ceric and ferricyanide solutions at room temperature. Both reactions efficiently generate oxygen functionalities on BDD surface. While a higher amount of “C–O” moieties is produced with Ce4+ as oxidizing agent, the use of ferricyanide specie seems the most interesting to specifically generate hydroxyl groups. Additionally, this easy to perform oxidative method appears not damaging for diamond surfaces and adapted to conductive or non-conductive materials. The resulting surfaces were characterized using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, contact angle and capacitance–voltage analysis.