Field emission from nitrogen-doped diamond film

Nitrogen-doped diamond films were prepared for the first time using melamine (C ₃H ₆N ₆) as the nitrogen source. To explore the differences in the films produced with different precursors, nitrogen-doped films were also produced using pure nitrogen gas as the source. Since melamine has a ring structure with pre-existing C-N bonds, the incorporation of nitrogen on substitutional sites of diamond lattice are expected. Relatively large amounts of substitutional nitrogen were successfully doped into diamond without degrading its quality. However, when pure nitrogen gas was used as a doping source, the quality of the diamond was not as high as the sample doped with nitrogen by melamine. Raman spectroscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL), and field emission measurements were carried out to characterize the samples. Nitrogen-doped diamond samples did not exhibit any significant reduction in turn-on fields. It is suggested that nitrogen doping has only a minor effect on the field emission properties of the diamond films.