Diamonds have a very powerful image with both the public and the scientific
community, because of their beauty and the historic difficulty in first synthesising it.
Diamond-like carbon (DLC) is much less famous, but it has a similar importance
in economic terms. DLC coatings are used on razor blades, in magnetic hard-disk
drives, on bar-code scanners, on PET bottles, and on some car parts. But how did
we develop the underlying technology? This book gives the detailed scientific and
technological answer to this question.
The historical overview describes how DLC has a much shorter history than
diamond itself, from the 1970s with Aisenberg and Chabot and then Holland using
plasma deposition to first grow hard, amorphous carbon films. A great deal of early
work was carried out by the group of Koidl in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Russian
groups invented the cathodic arc and used it on carbon, and this allowed growth of
a second type of hydrogen-free DLC. This material came to be known as tetrahedral
amorphous carbon, which is abbreviated as ta-C or TAC, or various similar
ways.