Influence of Surface Orientation on Electrochemical Properties of Boron-Doped Diamond

To study the influence of crystal orientation on the electrochemical properties of boron-doped diamond (BDD), electrodes comprising (100) and (111) homoepitaxial single-crystal layers of BDD were investigated and these were compared with a thin polycrystalline BDD electrode. The BDD samples with similar amounts of boron of around 1020 cm–3 and resistivity of around 6 × 10–3 Ω cm were prepared. Evaluation of the electrochemical reactivity of each of the samples with both H- and O-terminated surfaces showed that polycrystalline BDD was the most reactive, whereas the (111) samples proved to be more reactive than the (100) ones for single-crystal BDD. Moreover, considering the results of first-principles molecular dynamics simulations, it is proposed that surface transfer doping is the dominating factor for H-terminated surfaces, whereas the degree of band bending and the thickness of the space-charge layer are the dominating factors for O-terminated surfaces.