Abstract
Undoped and aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) thin films are prepared by the sol-gel process. Zinc acetate dihydrate, ethanol, and monoethanolamine are used as precursor, solvent, and stabilizer, respectively. In the case of AZO, aluminum nitrate nonahydrate is added to the precursor solution with an atomic percentage equal to 1 and 2 at.% Al. The multi thin layers are deposited by spin-coating onto glass substrates, and are transformed into ZnO upon annealing at 550 °C. Films display a strong preferential orientation, with high values for the Texture Coefficients (TC) of the (002) direction (TC(002) ≈ 3). The structural, morphological, and optical properties of the thin films as a function of aluminum content have been investigated using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), and Scanning Electronic Microscopy (SEM). Waveguiding properties of the thin films have been also studied using m-lines spectroscopy. The results indicate that the films are monomodes at 632.8 nm with optical propagation optical losses estimated around 1.6 decibel per cm (dB/cm).
Highlights
Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a II-VI group semiconductor and usually adopts a hexagonal wurtzite crystal structure [1,2,3,4]
The results show that our thin films support only the fundamental TE0 and guided mode spectra of 7-layer ZnO thin film (a) undoped, (b) 1 at.% Al-doped, (c) 2 at.% Al-doped
In this work we reported the investigation of pure and Al-doped ZnO thin films prepared by sol-gel process for optical waveguiding applications
Summary
Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a II-VI group semiconductor and usually adopts a hexagonal wurtzite crystal structure [1,2,3,4]. It has distinct advantages over other competitors, e.g., abundance in earth crust, non-toxicity, low material costs, chemical stability, high transparency in the visible and near infrared spectral region, etc. Because of its transparency, its electro-optical and elasto-optical properties, ZnO is attractive for integrated photonic devices [5,9]
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