Electroanalysis at diamond-like and doped-diamond electrodes

Diamond as a high performance material occupies a special place due to its in many ways extreme properties, e.g., hardness, chemical inertness, thermal conductivity, optical properties, and electric characteristics. Work mainly over the last decade has shown that diamond also occupies a special place as an electrode material with interesting applications in electroanalysis. When made sufficiently electrically conducting for example by boron-doping, 'thin film' and 'free-standing' diamond electrodes exhibit remarkable chemical resistance to etching, a wide potential window, low background current responses, mechanical stability towards ultrasound induced interfacial cavitation, a low 'stickiness' in adsorption processes, and a high degree of 'tunability' of the surface properties. This review summarizes some of the recent work aimed at applying conductive (boron-doped) diamond electrodes to improve procedures in electroanalysis.