Superconductivity and low-dimensional electrical transport in nanocrystalline diamond

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to summarise recent progress in the growth and doping of small-grain-sized chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond, often called nanocrystalline diamond. Nanodiamond thin films are interesting for many industrial applications as mechanically resilient layers or optical or biological coatings. Moreover, because of their low-dimensional character, the nanodiamond layers are attractive for studying the electrical transport mechanism in general. In this work, we have studied the influence of the disorder induced by B doping and the nanometric geometrical dimensions on the transport mechanism in B-doped nanocrystalline CVD diamond (B-NCD) films. We demonstrate the achievement of superconductive transition in B-NCD films and discuss the transport model.