Asymmetric phosphorus incorporation in homoepitaxial P-doped (111) diamond revealed by photoelectron holography.

Abstract

Diamond has two crystallographically inequivalent sites in the unit cell. In doped diamond, dopant occupation in the two sites is expected to be equal. Nevertheless, preferential dopant occupation during growth under non-equilibrium conditions is of fundamental importance, for example, to enhance the properties of nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) centres; therefore, this is a promising candidate for a qubit. However, the lack of suitable experimental techniques has made it difficult to study the crystal- and chemical-site-resolved local structures of dopants. Here, we confirm the identity of two chemical sites with asymmetric dopant incorporation in the diamond structure, via the photoelectron holography (PEH) of heavily phosphorus (P)-doped diamond prepared by chemical vapor deposition. One is substitutionally incorporated P with preferential site occupations and the other can be attributed to a PV split vacancy complex with preferential orientation. The present study shows that PEH is a valuable technique to study the local structures around dopants, with a resolution of crystallographically inequivalent but energetically equivalent sites/orientations. Such information provides strategies to improve the properties of dopant related-complexes in which alignment is crucial for sensing of magnetic field or quantum spin register using N-V centres in diamond.