Synthetic diamond is prized for its ability to handle extreme heat and electrical stress, making it one of the most sought-after materials for next-generation electronics and quantum devices. But before diamond-based technologies can reach their full potential, manufacturers need a reliable way to spot the microscopic defects that can undermine performance. Now, researchers at Rice University have built a tool that does exactly that — automatically, and in a matter of hours rather than days.
Tia Gray, a Rice doctoral alumna now working as a National Research Council postdoctoral associate at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, led the project. She and her colleagues developed a custom Python-based software platform that analyzes data from high-resolution X-ray diffraction — a technique that probes a material's internal crystal structure — and pinpoints dislocations, or irregularities in the atomic lattice. The software calculates dislocation density across a sample, flagging the flaws that can disrupt how charge and heat move through a device.
"Diamond is emerging as a key material for future high-power electronics, radio-frequency communication and quantum technologies because it can tolerate high heat and extreme electrical conditions better than many conventional semiconductors," Gray said. "However, its performance depends strongly on crystal quality."
The team tested the framework on four commercially available grades of single-crystal diamond with varying levels of purity. Their automated workflow clearly sorted them by quality: electronic-grade diamond showed the lowest defect density and most uniform crystal structure, while heteroepitaxial diamond — grown on a nondiamond substrate — exhibited the highest disorder. The researchers also applied the same approach to gallium nitride, another advanced semiconductor used in power electronics, and found consistent results, suggesting the method could be adapted across a wide range of materials.
Xiang Zhang, assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice and a corresponding author on the study, explained why this matters for real-world manufacturing. "Dislocations can disrupt how charge and heat move through the material, which impacts how efficient and reliable a device is and how easy it is to manufacture at scale," he said.
The research, published in the journal Advanced Materials, is a collaboration that includes Pulickel Ajayan, Rice's Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering. Ajayan sees the work as a practical step toward better diamond for demanding applications. "By making defect evaluation faster, more reproducible and less dependent on manual analysis, this approach provides a practical path toward improving diamond materials for next-generation electronic and quantum devices," he said.
The team plans to continue refining the methodology and expand it to analyze an even broader range of defect types — work that could ultimately help bring diamond-based electronics out of the lab and into the devices that power the modern world.