Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2011
A new spatially resolved electron energy-loss spectrometry (EELS) method was introduced to obtain atomic structure information of grain boundaries in diamond thin films grown by chemical vapor deposition. The electron energy-loss spectra recorded from the grain boundary regions showed different feature near the energy loss corresponding to carbon ls-to-π* transition, as compared to the spectra recorded from neighboring crystalline regions. This difference was attributed to dangling bonds in atoms with planar three-fold coordination. A series of experiments are described in this paper that exclude any possible artifact in result interpretation.