Electrophysical properties of carbon nanocomposites based on nanodiamonds irradiated with fast neutrons

The electrophysical properties of nanoporous carbon composites consisting of a nanometer-sized pyrolytic carbon matrix and nanodiamonds have been analyzed. It has been shown that the power-law dependence of the electrical resistivity on the thickness of the pyrolytic carbon layer $D$ on a log-log scale has an inflection for $D$ = 1 $\mathring{\mathrm{A}}$. It has been found that the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity of the nanocomposite is described by an exponential function with an exponent of 1/4 for both unirradiated samples and samples irradiated with fast neutrons. This is characteristic of variable-range hopping conductivity in the case of strong localization in systems with semiconductor conductivity in the presence of a local disorder. With an increase in the neutron fluence, the electrical resistivity of the studied material changes very significantly (by several hundred percent) and nonmonotonically. This result is associated with the transformation of the structure of the graphite-like matrix and with possible graphite-diamond phase transitions.