Diamond is the toughest substance present in nature is widely known. Meanwhile, out of many wants from the material – the possibility of its great potential as a superb electronic material is arousing interest of researchers. A joint effort led by a research team at the City University of Hong Kong that employed nanomechanical approach led to demonstrate the uniform elastic stress handling capacity of minuscule diamond arrays.
Consequent upon the finding, the potential of strained diamonds as key prospect for advanced functional devices in photonics, microelectronics, and quantum information technologies identified.
The findings of the research were recently published in the scientific journal Science.
In fact, this is the first time that the extremely large, consistent elasticity of diamond by intense experiments revealed. Furthermore, the possibility of development of electronic devices via ‘deep elastic strain engineering’ of minuscule diamond structure demonstrated.
Featuring several favorable physical properties, diamond finds use in industrial applications
Hitherto, owing to its well-known hardness, industrial applications of diamonds are usually drilling, cutting, or grinding. Besides this, diamond is also considered as a high-performance photonic and electronic material due to its several valuable properties. These include exceptional virtue of electric charge carrier mobility, ultra-high thermal conductivity, ultra-wide bandgap, and high breakdown strength.
“In fact, bandgap is a notable property of semiconductors, and wide bandgap allows function of high-frequency or high-power devices. For such reasons, diamond can be viewed as ‘Mount Everest’ of electronic materials that possesses all enumerated excellent properties,” said one of the researchers.
However, the compact crystal structure and large bandgap of diamond makes it difficult to be doped. In fact, with respect to semiconductors, this is a common way to modulate their electronic properties during production.