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!