Growth of diamond in an electrodeless capacitive RF discharge

Abstract Plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition (PACVD) of diamond was performed using an electrodeless capacitive RF discharge (13.56 MHz) in a quartz tube reactor. Silicon carbide (SiC) substrates were coated at RF powers up to 1 kW. The influence of the process gas, which was composed of different proportions of H 2 , CH 4 and CO 2 , on the properties of the deposited coatings was studied. Structural analyses of the films were accomplished using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman spectroscopy. With our deposition apparatus, differing from usual setups, we found a large variety of growth morphologies with characteristic Raman patterns. Besides the usual structures of low-pressure synthesized diamond, we observed several growth features not reported by other authors so far. Nevertheless, the occurrence of diamond growth is in agreement with the atomic CHO diamond deposition gas phase diagram introduced by Bachmann [ Adv. Mater., 2 (1990) 195].