ABSTRACT
Diamond considered to be the hardest known material on our planet has a variety of applications other than those usually found in ornaments. Owing to its unique characteristics like extreme hardness, high reflection coefficient, low friction, capability to act as both conductor and insulator and its noble character make it a potential candidate for applications in fields of ophthalmic glasses, sharp blades with long lives, field emission display devices and tribology, etc.
Diamond, mostly available only as a natural material and rare in supplies remains an extremely expensive item. Researchers have been able to develop diamond-like carbon (DLC), a material akin with properties of diamond. DLC boasts of different characteristics, when deposited under different conditions and different techniques.
Originally developed in 1971 by Aisenberg and Chabot, 1 research on DLC has matured quite a lot and researchers understand quite well the procedures and techniques required to be deployed to develop DLC best suiting a particular kind of application. The most important of these techniques are plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, ion beam 174method, and saddle field fast atom beam source techniques. All these techniques come with a variety of internal modifications, their strengths, and limitations.
This chapter discusses the typical characteristics of diamond as the material, a detailed description of techniques to deposit and characterize these films. Taking care of a typical academician’s angle, chapter also dwells on the kind of laboratory experiments which can be easily setup in an academic institute to further appreciate the concepts covered in the chapter.
