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A large part of my research focuses on diamond — but not diamond as a gemstone or even as a material in isolation. What interests me is its surface: the thin boundary where diamond meets the outside world, and where, it turns out, most of its useful properties actually come from.
Diamond is an unusual semiconductor. Unlike silicon or most other materials, it doesn't grow a native oxide layer when exposed to air. Instead, its surface stays "bare," terminated by whatever atoms or molecules happen to be around — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, fluorine, and more. This might sound like a technical detail, but it isn't: each termination changes how electrons behave right at the surface, which in turn governs everything diamond is good for. It can determine whether a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center — the atomic-scale defect at the heart of diamond-based quantum sensing — holds onto its charge state or loses it. It can determine whether the surface conducts electricity or blocks it. And it can determine whether diamond, when illuminated, releases electrons directly into a surrounding liquid — a rare and powerful property behind its use in electrochemistry, CO₂ reduction, and green energy applications.
My work is about connecting these dots: building a general framework that links surface chemistry, band structure, and charge transfer at diamond interfaces, so that the same physics can explain quantum defects, electronic devices, and (photo)electrochemical reactions, instead of treating each as its own separate puzzle. I use synchrotron X-ray spectroscopy alongside lab-based experiments to probe these interfaces directly — from nanodiamonds to boron-doped surfaces to the high-purity crystals used in quantum technologies — and to figure out how to engineer them on purpose, rather than stumble into the right surface by accident.
Diamond's lack of a native oxide makes it an unusually clean system to work this out in. But the ideas don't stop at diamond: any semiconductor interface where charge transfer and surface electrostatics matter can, in principle, be understood the same way.
CVD chamber (up), diamond single crystal grown by CVD pure (bottom left) and doped with boron atoms (bottom right).
Diamonds are Expensive?
Diamonds are Expensive?
Diamonds are Industrially produced!
Detonation synthesis, also known as explosive synthesis, produces nanodiamonds. A mixture of carbon-containing explosive materials, such as TNT or RDX, is detonated under controlled conditions. The detonation generates an intense shock wave that creates a high-pressure and high-temperature environment for a brief moment. The carbon atoms rapidly transform into diamond crystals, and the rapid quenching that follows freezes the diamond crystals. The resulting detonation nanodiamonds are typically very small, with sizes ranging from a few nanometers to a few hundred nanometers. They are useful in various industrial applications, including as additives in lubricants, fillers in composite materials, and as carriers for drug delivery systems in medicine.
On the other hand, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a more modern and widely used technique to produce high-quality gem-grade diamonds. In CVD, a mixture of hydrogen and methane is introduced into a vacuum chamber, forming a plasma. Under controlled conditions, carbon atoms deposit layer by layer on a substrate, typically a diamond seed. This process allows for the precise control of diamond growth, resulting in large, high-quality diamonds suitable for use in jewelry and research or large polycrystal wafers used for electrochemistry.
In contrary to other materials, when the electrons of diamonds are excited by light, they naturally escape the crystal and are emitted in their environment. In water, the emission of solvated electrons from diamonds is a fascinating phenomenon that has garnered significant interest in recent research. These solvated electrons are highly reactive and capable of transferring their energy to nearby molecules, leading to various chemical reactions. So that diamonds has promising applications in fields like photochemistry and catalysis. This unique property of diamond seems particularly enhanced by the presence of surface state. Understanding and harnessing the emission of solvated electrons from diamonds open up exciting possibilities for advancing diverse scientific and technological frontiers!
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