Nanofabrication of sharp diamond tips by e-beam lithography and inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching

Ultrasharp diamond tips make excellent atomic force microscopy probes, field emitters, and abrasive articles due to diamond's outstanding physical properties, i.e., hardness, low friction coefficient, low work function, and toughness. Sharp diamond tips are currently fabricated as individual tips or arrays by three principal methods: (1) focused ion beam milling and gluing onto a cantilever of individual diamond tips, (2) coating silicon tips with diamond films, or (3) molding diamond into grooves etched in a sacrificial substrate, bonding the sacrificial substrate to another substrate or electrodepositing of a handling chip, followed by dissolution of the sacrificial substrate. The first method is tedious and serial in nature but does produce very sharp tips, the second method results in tips whose radius is limited by the thickness of the diamond coating, while the third method involves a costly bonding and release process and difficulties in thoroughly filling the high aspect ratio apex of molding grooves with diamond at the nanoscale. To overcome the difficulties with these existing methods, this article reports on the feasibility of the fabrication of sharp diamond tips by direct etching of ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD (R)) as a starting and structural material. The UNCD is reactive ion etched using a cap-precursor-mask scheme. An optimized etching recipe demonstrates the formation of ultrasharp diamond tips (similar to 10 nm tip radius) with etch rates of 650 nm/min.