Evaporation and alignment of 1-undecene functionalised nanodiamonds

The possibility to align diamond nanoparticles has a number of potential technological applications, but there are few methods by which this can be achieved, and research in this field can be considered to be in its infancy. Hitherto, two methods which have been commonly used are lithography and chemical vapour deposition (CVD), but these methods are both complex and have poor effectiveness. In this paper, we present a new technique for particle alignment, which is simpler and avoids particle structural damage. The method works by functionalising the nanodiamonds of size 5 nm by attaching 1-undecene onto the nanodiamond surfaces; the particles are then evaporated using UHV and deposited onto TEM grids and mica surfaces at 200 °C. XPS, SERS, HRTEM, luminescence spectroscopy and luminescence micro-imaging have been applied to characterise samples both before and after evaporation. Deposition of nanodiamond onto a mica surface resulted in particle alignment with length scales of 500 µm. The XPS and Raman spectra confirmed the absence of non-diamond carbon (sp2-hybridized carbon). Moreover, photoluminescence (emitting in the range of 2.48-1.55 eV; 500-800 nm) which is characteristic for nanodiamond with size of 5 nm was also observed, both before and after evaporation of the functionalised nanodiamonds.