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 |