Can a metal nanoparticle based catalyst drive the selective growth of bright SiV color centers in CVD diamonds ?

We propose an efficient catalytic method based on nickel nanoparticles to produce a massive amount of Si color centers in diamonds directly during the CVD growth. A thermodynamic model was firstly developed to describe the mechanism of the Si inclusion in diamonds and a subsequent series of diamond syntheses was carried out to corroborate the model. Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy as well as electron microscopy were used to characterize the diamond samples. All the treatments with Ni nanoparticles were able to produce diamond samples with a Si related fluorescence intensity higher than the one related to the un-treated samples. Finally a critical discussion of our results, in comparison with the ones reported in literature, is presented. 1. Introduction