Reducing Threading Dislocations of Single-Crystal Diamond via In Situ Tungsten Incorporation

A lower dislocation density substrate is essential for realizing high performance in single-crystal diamond electronic devices. The in-situ tungsten-incorporated homoepitaxial diamond by introducing tungsten hexacarbonyl has been proposed. A 3 x 3 x 0.5 mm(3) high-pressure, high-temperature (001) diamond substrate was cut into four pieces with controlled experiments. The deposition of tungsten-incorporated diamond changed the atomic arrangement of the original diamond defects so that the propagation of internal dislocations could be inhibited. The SEM images showed that the etching pits density was significantly decreased from 2.8 x 10(5) cm(-2) to 2.5 x 10(3) cm(-2). The reduction of XRD and Raman spectroscopy FWHM proved that the double-layer tungsten-incorporated diamond has a significant effect on improving the crystal quality of diamond bulk. These results show the evident impact of in situ tungsten-incorporated growth on improving crystal quality and inhibiting the dislocations propagation of homoepitaxial diamond, which is of importance for high-quality diamond growth.