Diffusion of Vacancies Created by High‐Energy Heavy Ion Strike Into Diamond

A novel technique is proposed to measure how far vacancies diffuse from the initial damaged region with sub‐micrometer resolution. Vacancies created by a single heavy ion with high energy are considered. The most important feature of the single ion track is the quasi‐one‐dimensional vacancy distribution with high volume density, which exceeds 1019 vacancies cm−3. After annealing, the vacancies combine with nitrogen impurities to form nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers. With increasing annealing temperature and time, the distribution of NV centers becomes wider. Therefore, the vacancies created by a single heavy ion are suitable to investigate vacancy diffusion. The activation energy of vacancy migration in diamond is determined to be 2.12 eV, which is in reasonable agreement with reported values.