Complementary investigations using charged particles and muons in the study of hydrogen in diamond

The defect that has almost exclusively occupied attention has been that associated with nitrogen. With the advent of quantitative nuclear analytical techniques it has become evident that, in natural diamond, hydrogen and oxygen are also major impurities. In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the role of hydrogen in the growth, particularly, of CVD diamond, but also its influence on the properties of all types of diamond. Traditional nuclear resonant reaction analysis and nuclear scattering, time differential perturbed angular distribution and correlation measurements, ion implantation and ion channeling have been deployed. Recently the atom 'muonium' has been appreciated as behaving as a light isotope of hydrogen, and hence presents a powerful instrument for hydrogen studies. In diamond muonium has revealed the lattice location and temperature stability of the preferred sites that it occupies, and has shown a new and unexpected defect of rhombic symmetry which is interpreted as a hydrogen (muonium)-nitrogen structure.