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Optical and structural study of low dose alpha irradiated zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film

B. ABDALLAH1,* , A. ISMAIL2

Affiliation

  1. aDepartment of Physics, Atomic Energy Commission of Syria, Damascus, P. O. Box 6091, Syria
  2. bDepartment of Protection and Safety, Atomic Energy Commission of Syria, Damascus, P. O. Box 6091, Syria

Abstract

In this paper, the effect of low-dose alpha particles irradiation on the optical and structural properties of different thicknesses ZnO thin films was investigated. Preferentially oriented (002) ZnO thin films were prepared using radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering where Si (100) and glass were chosen as substrates. ZnO films with c-axis-oriented Würtzite structure are obtained at room temperature. The effect of the irradiation was tested on ZnO films prepared with two different thickness of 300 nm and 700 nm representing thin and thick film, respectively. The irradiation was realized using a 5-MeV alpha particles beam emitted from an Americium-241 alpha sources (Am-241). The films were irradiated to different radiation doses (1.5 to 25 Gy). The obtained results showed that the PL intensity was found to increase with increasing of the radiation dose in both thin and thick ZnO films. This finding allows improving the scintillation output signal of the material. Moreover, the X-ray diffraction patterns did not show any changes in the grain size. However, the band gap extracted by UV transmittance spectrum was found to be slightly decreased with increasing the radiation dose..

Keywords

ZnO film, Magnetron sputtering, Alpha irradiation, Optical characterization.

Submitted at: Sept. 2, 2018
Accepted at: June 14, 2019

Citation

B. ABDALLAH, A. ISMAIL, Optical and structural study of low dose alpha irradiated zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film, Journal of Optoelectronics and Advanced Materials Vol. 21, Iss. 5-6, pp. 401-406 (2019)