A Surface Etching for Synthetic Diamonds with Nano-Thick Ni Films and Low Temperature Annealing

Ni (100 nm thick) was deposited onto synthesized diamonds to fabricate etched diamonds. Next, those diamonds were annealed at varying temperatures ($400{\sim}1200^{\circ}C$) for 30 minutes and then immersed in 30 wt% $HNO_3$ to remove the Ni layers. The etched properties of the diamonds were examined with FE-SEM, micro-Raman, and VSM. The FE-SEM results showed that the Ni agglomerated at a low annealing temperature (${\sim}400^{\circ}C$), and self-aligned hemisphere dots formed at an annealing temperature of $800^{\circ}C$. Those dots became smaller with a bimodal distribution as the annealing temperature increased. After stripping the Ni layers, etch pits and trigons formed with annealing temperatures above $400^{\circ}C$ on the surface of the diamonds. However, surface graphite layers existed above $1000^{\circ}C$. The B-H loop results showed that the coercivity of the samples increased to 320 Oe (from 37 Oe) when the annealing temperature increased to $600^{\circ}C$ and then, decreased to 150 Oe with elevated annealing temperatures. This result indicates that the coercivity was affected by magnetic domain pinning at temperatures below $600^{\circ}C$ and single domain behavior at elevated temperatures above $800^{\circ}C$ consistent with the microstructure results. Thus, the results of this study show that the surface of diamonds can be etched.