A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / High purity natural type Il a diamond specimens were used in this study. Conducting
layers in the surfaces of these diamonds were generated using low-ion dose multiple
implantation-annealing steps. The implantation energies and the ion-doses were spread
evenly to intermix the point-defects, thereby increasing the probability of interstitialvacancy
recombinations and promoting dopant-interstitial-vacancy combination resulting
in activated dopant sites in the implanted layers. The process used to prepare our samples
is known as cold-implantation-rapid-annealing (CIRA). Carbon-ion and boron-ion
implantation was used to prepare the diamond specimens, and de-conductivity measurements
in the temperature range of 1.5-300 K were made following each CIRA sequence.
An electrical conductivity crossover from the Mott variable range hopping (VRH)
to the Efros-Shklovskii VRH conduction was observed when the temperature of insulating
samples was lowered. The conductivity crossover temperature Tcross decreases with
increasing concentration of the boron-ion dose in the implanted layers, indicating the narrowing
of the Coulomb gap in the single-particle density of states near the Fermi energy. (Abbreviation abstract) / Andrew Chakane 2019
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/26301 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Tshepe, Tshakane |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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