H. H. Chen-Mayer and G. P. Lamaze, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA

There has been a growing interest in diamond films because of their demonstrated cold electron emission capacity and their potential as planar cold cathodes. In general it is understood that the nitrogen content can affect the emission. A less well understood area is doping effects. Particularly, the creation of shallow donors, acceptors and quasi-continuous bands has not been comprehensively studied for disordered CVD diamond materials. Doping with boron during growth has been successful, but doping with N and P has not been fully evaluated. We report a non-destructive technique for quantitative determination of nitrogen concentration and distribution in CVD diamond films. The nitrogen content of the films has been measured at the NIST cold neutron depth profiling (CNDP) instrument. Nitrogen analysis is obtained from the energy loss of the protons from the 14N(n,p) reaction. The amount and distribution of nitrogen into diamond lattice deposited at various conditions can be studied. We discuss efforts in the establishment of a well-characterized working standard for nitrogen concentration and improvement of the depth resolution for nitrogen measurements. The current working standard for concentration is a boron implant with nitrogen determined by the cross section ratio of the two isotopes. The current depth resolution for nitrogen is 25 nm (full-width at half maximum).