Nature | SUSTech Professor Kwai Li's Research Team Publishes Breakthrough Results in Diamond Membrane Fabrication and Applications

2024-12-24 Research News views：11

A collaborative research team led by Assistant Professor Kwai Li from the School of Microelectronics at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), together with Researcher Qi Wang from the Peking University Dongguan Institute of Optoelectronics, Professor Yuan Lin from the University of Hong Kong, and Associate Professor Zhiqin Chu, has achieved significant progress in the fabrication and application of diamond membrane materials. They have successfully developed a method capable of batch-producing large-area, ultra-smooth, and ultra-flexible diamond membranes. This achievement represents a milestone in the field of materials science and paves the way for the commercial application of diamond membranes. The related research results were published in Nature under the title "Scalable production of ultraflat and ultraflexible diamond membrane." Dr. Jixiang Jing from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Hong Kong is the first author. He served as a research assistant in Professor Li's group from 2019 to 2020 and has been a visiting student/scholar in the group since 2020. Qi Wang, Kwai Li, Yuan Lin, and Zhiqin Chu are the co-corresponding authors.

Diamond is considered a preferred material for electronic and photonic applications due to its outstanding physical and chemical properties. However, despite tremendous efforts over the past few decades, the widespread application of ultrathin diamond membranes has remained unrealized, and their large-scale production still faces numerous challenges. This research successfully developed a method using tape peeling after edge cutting to efficiently produce diamond membranes that are large-area (2-inch wafer scale), ultrathin (sub-micrometer thickness), ultra-smooth (surface roughness below the nanometer level), and ultra-flexible (capable of 360° bending). The as-produced high-quality membranes not only possess flat surfaces suitable for micro/nano-scale processing operations but also exhibit ultra-flexibility that enables their direct application in elastic strain engineering and deformation sensing, which is unattainable with traditional, thicker diamond films. Through systematic experimental and theoretical investigations, the research team further confirmed that the quality of the peeled membrane is closely related to the peeling angle and membrane thickness. Within an optimized range of operating parameters, large-area, intact diamond membranes can be stably produced. This technological innovation in diamond membrane fabrication provides a practical pathway for the large-scale production of high-quality diamond membranes and is expected to accelerate the commercialization of diamond materials in electronics, photonics, and related fields.

Original paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08218-x