Low-temperature transport in highly boron-doped nanocrystalline diamond

We studied the transport properties of highly boron-doped nanocrystalline diamond thin films at temperatures down to 50 mK. The system undergoes a doping-induced metal-insulator transition with an interplay between intergranular conductance g and intragranular conductance g₀, as expected for a granular system. The conduction mechanism in the case of the low-conductivity films close to the metal-insulator transition has a temperature dependence similar to Efros-Shklovskii type of hopping. On the metallic side of the transition, in the normal state, a logarithmic temperature dependence of the conductivity is observed, as expected for a metallic granular system. Metallic samples far away from the transition show similarities to heavily boron-doped single-crystal diamond. Close to the transition, the behavior is richer. Global phase coherence leads in both cases to superconductivity (also checked by ac susceptibility), but a peak in the low-temperature magnetoresistance measurements occurs for samples close to the transition. Corrections to the conductance according to superconducting fluctuations account for this negative magnetoresistance.