Behavior of crystal defects in synthetic type-IIa single-crystalline diamond at high temperatures under normal pressure

The behavior of dislocation lines (DLs) and stacking faults (SFs) in synthetic type-IIa single-crystalline diamond at high temperatures under normal pressure has been investigated. After annealing the diamond at 1500 °C for 60 min in pure N2 atmosphere, straight DLs were bent to converge to fewer curved dislocation bundles, so that some of the stacking faults were extinct while new DLs appeared at the edges of the removed SFs. These results indicate that SFs in the diamond examined belong to the Shockley type, and that the Shockley partials changed to a perfect dislocation. From this result, the following generation mechanism has been proposed for SFs in diamond. On one hand, because [112] dislocations in the (111) growth sector are contained in the slip plane labelled as (1̅1̅1), one perfect dislocation tends to be split into two Shockley partials and a SF when an appropriate stress is applied. On the other hand, the angle between the {111} slip plane and the direction of bundled dislocations in the (001) growth sector is as high as 54.7°, so that a perfect dislocation can hardly slip into partial dislocations. Thus, SFs exist only in the (111) growth sector of type IIa diamond.