materialsscienceandengineering: Semiconductors: Diamonds Though diamonds are perhaps better known fo
materialsscienceandengineering: Semiconductors: Diamonds Though diamonds are perhaps better known for their hardness and usage in jewelry and ornamentation, with the addition of certain dopants diamond functions as a semiconductor, offering useful properties that other current semiconductors don’t. Pure (carbon) diamond are strong electrical insulators, but blue diamonds (rare, but naturally occurring) are diamonds naturally (or synthetically) with boron. The addition of boron is the reason for the change in color but also serves to create p-type semiconductors. N-type semiconductors can also be created in synthetic diamonds by doping them with phosphorus. The resulting diamond semiconductors have wide band gaps and high electron mobilities, on top of retaining the high thermal conductivity found in pure diamonds. Currently, diamond semiconductors are typically only found in research or testing applications, because of the difficulties of n-type doping and the creation of diamond p-n junctions, but if these factors can be overcome the possible applications of diamond semiconductors are many and varied. Research has been conducted on diamond sensors that take advantage of nitrogen-vacancy centers and have wider ranges of spatial resolution than current sensors. Diamond transistors have also been produced, and diamond’s useful properties make them a material of interest in high power applications. Sources/Further Reading: (1 - images 1 and 5) (2 - image 2) (3 - image 4) ( 4 )( 5 ) ( 6 ) Image 3. -- source link