A group of Takayuki Iwasaki , Mutsuko Hatano and |
vacancy ( NV ) centers , a type of point defect that arises |
colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology , the Japan |
when two neighboring carbon atoms are removed from |
Science and Technology Agency ( JST ) and Toshiharu |
the diamond lattice and one of them is replaced by a |
Makino at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial |
nitrogen atom . |
Science and Technology ( AIST ) has reported a new method for sensing internal electric fields at the interior of operating semiconductor devices . |
NV centers can be routinely created in diamond by means of ion implantation . A nearby electric field affects an NV center ' s energy state , which in turn can be probed by a |
The technique exploits the response of an artificially |
method called optically detected magnetic resonance |
introduced single electron spin to variations in its |
( ODMR ). |
surrounding electric field , and enabled the researchers to study a semiconductor diode subject to bias voltages of up to 150 V . |
The researchers first fabricated a diamond p-i-n diode ( an intrinsic diamond layer sandwiched between an electronand a hole-doped layer ) embedded with NV centers . They |
Iwasaki and co-workers applied their method to diamond , a |
then localized an NV center in the bulk of the i-layer , |
so-called wide-band-gap semiconductor in which the |
several hundreds of nanometers away from the interface , |
electric fields can become very strong -- a property |
and recorded its ODMR spectrum for increasing bias |
important for low-loss electronic applications . Diamond |
voltages . From these spectra , values for the electric field |
has the advantage that it easily accommodates nitrogen- |
could be obtained using theoretical formulas . The |