Smoothing of diamond substrate by mechanical lapping

Diamond has good material properties such as high hardness, thermal resistance and no anisotropy on mechanical properties. Thus, diamond is utilized as the cutting tool, alternative forms of cemented carbide mold and heat sink. However, diamond substrate is hard to machine because it possess the high-hardness and high chemical inertness. The conventional polishing of diamond is usually carried out on a high-speed rotating disk (called scaife) with a diamond abrasives. So mechanical damage and surface irregularities were remained on the polished diamond surface. In this study, we prepared the ideal polishing plate charged with 35Pm-sized-diamond grains and tried to conduct the mechanical polishing of diamond for fabricating a high quality single crystal diamond (100) surface. As a results, atomically smooth diamond surface could be obtained by a mechanical polishing method using polishing plate charged with 35Pm-sized-diamond grains.