Recent developments of high quality synthetic diamond single crystals for synchrotron X-ray monochromators

For several years now, the ESRF, the University of the Witwatersrand and Messrs. De Beers Industrial Diamonds (Pty) Ltd. through their Diamond Research Laboratory, have pursued a development programme to assess and improve the quality of synthetic diamonds. Recently, in an effort to study the influence of nitrogen impurities on the defect structure, X-ray excited optical luminescence and spatially resolved double-crystal diffractometry were employed as new techniques. The correlation between nitrogen impurities and the raw defect structure was clearly visible. It was confirmed that concentration variations are related to lattice imperfections, where tilts are much more important than lattice constant variations. High reflectivity was observed and quite large zones of a sample bigger than 1 cm2 showed to be perfect to within better than 0.5 arcsec.