  High quality, thin diamond membranes containing nitrogen-vacancy centers
provide critical advantages in the fabrication of diamond-based structures for
a variety of applications, including wide field magnetometry, photonics and
bio-sensing. In this work we describe, in detail, the generation of thin,
optically-active diamond membranes by means of ion implantation and overgrowth.
To establish the suitability of our method for photonic applications, photonic
crystal cavities with quality factor of 1000 are fabricated.
