Recent Advances on Diamond-Based Optical, Electronic, and Optoelectronic Devices

Dear Colleagues,

Diamond’s properties as a wide-bandgap semiconductor have been well-known for several decades.

Some diamond-based devices for niche applications, such as small-field dosimetry for radiotherapy, have already found their place in the market, thanks to a well-established technology that allows diamond biological tissue-equivalence to be efficiently exploited.

Conversely, some other diamond properties, although excellent, still cannot be fully exploited in a commercializable device, mostly because of immature technologies that find it hard to be reliable enough to make prototypes cross the borders of research labs. That is the case, for example, of diamond planar field-effect transistors (FETs) for high-power high-frequency electronics, the performance of which is limited by the instability of the surface hydrogen termination.

However, in recent years, the integration of advanced techniques into the fabrication and the characterization of diamond-based devices enhanced their performance and reliability. We can think of diamond FinFETs without hydrogen ternination, or high-quality single-crystal diamond membranes for radioisotope batteries, but there is a whole list, namely: Schottky diodes, PIN diodes, micro‐nano electromechanical (MEMS/NEMS) devices, microlenses, and so on.

There is more. Most of these techniques have indeed demonstrated the ability to manipulate the physical properties of diamond, paving the way for the exploitation of diamond-based devices in fields of application so far precluded. The most significant example is ultrafast pulsed laser processing, used to turn semi-transparent native diamond into “black” diamond for high-temperature solar cells, or to inscribe graphite electrodes within a bulk diamond crystal for 3D radiation detectors, or even to introduce, at selected locations, coherent colour centres (such as NV centres) for a new generation of quantum information and sensing devices.

This Special Issue aims at giving an overview of the recent progress made in the design, fabrication, and characterization of diamond-based optical, electronic, and optoelectronic devices. Both the long-standing (e.g., RF power electronics, detection of ionizing radiation and particles) and the relatively new (e.g., solar and thermal energy conversion, quantum information processing and sensing) fields of application of diamond will be considered, with a special focus on the tailoring process of the material properties.

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit a manuscript for this Special Issue. Full papers, communications, and reviews are all welcome.

Dr. Marco Girolami
Guest Editor

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