Fabrication of thin diamond membranes for photonic applications

High quality, thin diamond membranes containing nitrogen-vacancy centers provide critical advantages in the fabrication of diamond-based structures for a variety of applications, including wide field magnetometry, photonics and bio-sensing. In this work we describe, in detail, the generation of thin, optically-active diamond membranes by means of ion implantation and overgrowth. To establish the suitability of our method for photonic applications, photonic crystal cavities with quality factor of 1000 are fabricated.