Smart Cut Transfer of Wide‐Bandgap Materials: The Case of Diamond

Diamond exhibits a unique combination of exceptional properties, making it a highly attractive material for advanced technologies. Yet, these outstanding characteristics come at a cost: Diamond remains difficult to fabricate and is not readily available in large formats. In this context, the well‐known Smart Cut layer transfer process—based on ion implantation and annealing—has been adapted for the first time to diamond. Turning a limitation into an advantage, the metastable nature of diamond allows for reducing the thermal budget required for cleavage. By finely tuning the implantation conditions, a buried sp 2 ‐rich layer can be created to serve as a fracture plane. Using this method, we successfully transfer an ~800‐nm‐thick diamond film onto a silicon substrate via metal bonding. After plasma etching of the residual sp 2 ‐rich layer, the transferred diamond preserves good crystalline quality, as confirmed by transmission electronic microscopy (TEM), electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), nanobeam diffraction, and Raman spectroscopy. While some implantation‐induced point defects remain, they may be mitigated by a post‐transfer annealing step. These results show that Smart Cut can be extended to ultrahard and chemically inert materials like diamond. This opens new perspectives for cost‐effective, epi‐ready diamond substrates on engineered hosts, paving the way for future high‐performance electronics and quantum technologies.