ETCHING AND THINNING FOR THE FABRICATION OF LITHOGRAPHICALLY PATTERNED DIAMOND NANOSTRUCTURES

摘要

A back side of a diamond or other substrate is thinned using plasma etches and a mask situated away from the back side by a spacer having a thickness between 50 μm and 250 μm. Typically, a combined RIE/ICP etch is used to thin the substrate from 20-40 μm to less than 1 μm. For applications in which color centers are implanted or otherwise situated on a front side of the diamond substrate, after thinning, a soft graded etch is applied to reduce color center linewidth, particularly for nitrogen vacancy (NV) color centers.