Electrical properties of hydrogenated diamond

Abstract
Hydrogen passivation of deep traps in diamond is demonstrated. Current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of polycrystalline thin film and bulk diamond were studied before and after hydrogenation. On hydrogenation, all the samples showed several orders of magnitude increase in conductivity. Hydrogenation was carried out under controlled conditions to study the changes in the I-V characteristics of the samples. The concentration of uncompensated traps was varied systematically by hydrogenation. The concentration of electrically active hydrogen was determined from the I-V data. It is shown that hydrogenation is an alternative to deep-level transient spectroscopy, suitable for characterization of traps in a wide-band-gap material like diamond.