Controllable preparation of surface nanostructures on boron doped diamond by plasma etching

Abstract Due to the high hardness and chemical inertness of diamond, it is difficult to fabricate diamond nanostructures, especially with a high aspect ratio. Plasma etching is an attractive technology for processing diamonds due to its high anisotropic nature and fine controllability, which is of great significance to diamond machining and diamond device fabrication. In this paper, we fabricated large area and high aspect ratio diamond nanoneedle arrays on boron-doped diamond (BDD) by using a maskless inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching process. The ICP etching was performed in hydrogen (H) and hydrogen/argon (H/Ar) plasma. Then, the influences of duration and pressure on the morphology of diamond nanostructures were studied, and the mechanism of formation of nanoneedle arrays was discussed. The research results show that ICP etching is a simple and efficient method for fabricating diamond nanostructures, which provides a promising way for the industrial fabrication of large-scale BDD nanostructures.