Growth of diamond films on copper

Copper and diamond both have cubic crystal structures and similar lattice constants, making Cu an excellent candidate substrate for the heteroepitaxial growth of electronic device quality diamond. In this study a Cu substrate preparation method was developed to obtain large-area, free-standing polycrystalline diamond films. Concurrently, a statistically designed experiment was used to maximize the diamond film quality and resulted in (111) and (100) faceted films of quality comparable to or better than those grown on Si. The diamond films were analyzed by Raman spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy.