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Effects of substrate temperature on the structure and photoelectrical properties of ZnO films prepared via sputtering

XIAOLING FAN1,1, JUNCHENG LIU1,* , SHENQIU ZHAI1, RUI DING1

Affiliation

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo 255049

Abstract

ZnO thin films were prepared using radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering from a ZnO ceramic target. The effects of the substrate temperature on the ZnO thin film structure, surface morphology and photoelectrical properties were investigated. The ZnO films were all composed of polycrystalline grains with hexagonal wurtzite structures and a c-axis preference. With an increase in the substrate temperature, the c-axis preference of the ZnO thin film crystal grain was more obvious, and the grain size increased slightly; the granule size, consisting of many grains, also increased. More importantly, the granule’s outline changed from a sheet to spherical; the film’s inner stress changed from compressive to tensile. The film’s carrier concentration increased by nearly three orders of magnitude, whereas its Hall mobility decreased fourfold. The film’s resistivity decreased by more than two orders of magnitude as the substrate temperature increased from 25 to 600 °C. Although the thin film transmittance decreased slightly with an increase in the substrate temperature, all of the films exhibited high transmittances that averaged 85% in the visible region (400~800 nm). Additionally, the optical band gap for the ZnO thin films also decreased slightly and ranged from 3.28 to 3.26 eV..

Keywords

ZnO, Thin film, Substrate temperature, RF magnetron sputtering, Photoelectrical property.

Submitted at: Oct. 7, 2016
Accepted at: Aug. 9, 2017

Citation

XIAOLING FAN, JUNCHENG LIU, SHENQIU ZHAI, RUI DING, Effects of substrate temperature on the structure and photoelectrical properties of ZnO films prepared via sputtering, Journal of Optoelectronics and Advanced Materials Vol. 19, Iss. 7-8, pp. 511-516 (2017)