Real time investigation of diamond nucleation by laser scattering

Diamond nucleation onto diamond-free substrates remains a major challenge for most diamond films applications. In order to quickly form a continuous film across a given surface, several pre-treatments of the substrate have been developed to increase the nucleation density. Amongst those, Bias Enhanced Nucleation (BEN) has been used intensively for many applications, including for instance the synthesis of ultra-thin diamond films, heteroepitaxial diamond films, or nanodiamond films. The determination of the nucleation kinetics during the BEN pretreatment is particularly relevant in order to obtain fundamental informations about plasma/surface interactions and associated nucleation mechanisms. Besides, it is a key challenge to optimise the BEN step for specific applications, such as epitaxy or high nucleation density. The sequential approach which consists of interrupting the process at different time intervals for nucleation density measurement is time consuming and not accurate enough. We propose a real time investigation of diamond nucleation by laser scattering applied to the Bias Enhanced Nucleation (BEN) pre-treatment on silicon carbide. The Microwave Plasma Chemical Vapour Deposition (MPCVD) reactor was equipped with a laser reflectometry system associated with a lock-in laser intensity measurement. In parallel, a kinetics model of nucleation was drawn based on light diffusion of diamond nanoparticles according to their size and density. The modelling results were compared to the experimental data, and characteristic kinetic parameters were worked out for diamond nucleation on silicon carbide. In this study we demonstrated that using a model based on nanoparticles laser scattering it is possible to determine in real time the kinetics of diamond nucleation.