Ian McGuire

Major: Physics
Mentors: Lillian Hughes & Rachel Schoeppner, Professor Ania Jayich

Characterization of Bulk Electron Irradiation Tool for Nitrogen Vacancy Generation

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defects within diamonds are of keen interest to the field of quantum sensing as they can be used to detect the strength and orientation of electric and magnetic fields, alongside other physical phenomena. NV defects are comprised of a substitutional nitrogen atom tied to a vacancy in the diamond lattice. One way to fabricate these defects is to implant vacancies in a nitrogen-doped diamond, which can be achieved using electron irradiation1. We sought to characterize the effects of varying electron irradiation doses on the creation of vacancy-related defects in a chemical vapour deposition (CVD) grown diamond sample by using a bulk electron irradiation tool from PCT Ebeam and Integration. Studied defects include: neutrally charged nitrogen-vacancy centres (NV0), negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centres (NV-), silicon-vacancy centres (SiV), and single-vacancies (V). In order to investigate these defects we made use of a Raman spectrometer to take photoluminescence (PL) spectra of our sample under a cryogenic environment in order to find relative densities of the defects. We then took quantitative PL measurements using a confocal microscope to match our Raman data onto standard NV characterization metrics. Finally, we used identical techniques to correlate our findings from the PCT irradiation tool with defect generation accomplished through transmission electron microscopy (TEM) irradiation, which is the predominant method for forming NV centres in diamonds.

[1] C. A. McLellan, B, A. Myers, S. Kraemer, K. Ohno, D. D. Awschalom, and A. C. Bleszynski Jayich
Nano Letters 2016 16 (4), 2450-2454
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b05304