Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank Dr Jason Riley and Dr
Paul May for their help, guidance, encouragement and friendship over the last
four years.
I thank Dr Matt Alexander for his collaboration on
the project, his hard work with the evaporator and his help when the flaming
absinth olympics went so spectacularly wrong.
Thanks go to Keith Rosser for his advice on how to
fix the equipment in the diamond lab when it failed or needed modification.
Thanks to the Interface Analysis Centre (for SIMS
experiments, Raman Spectroscopy and the use of their microscope equipped with a
CCD camera), Millbrook Instruments (for SIMS measurements) and Professor Steve
Mann’s lab group (for platinum sputtering).
I would like to thank Carolyn Hodgetts, Joanna
Wilkinson, Giles Robertson and Abudinnar Hassan, the four undergraduates who
worked with me on the electrochemistry of diamond.
In addition to the people mentioned above, I would
like to thank all the other members of the diamond lab group (the BUDGies) and
the physical electrochemistry lab group, especially the other post-grads and
post-docs: Steve Hickey, Dr Ray Wat, Stu Leeds, James Petherbridge, Liz Tull,
Sean Pearce, Ming-Tsun Kuo, Fred Claeyssens, James Smith and Gustavo Pastor
Moreno.
I would like to thank my new colleagues at JLP who
have given me so much encouragement while I was writing up.
Finally, but most importantly, I would like to thank
Dr Sara Churchill.
Cheers Then!