Effect of plasma oxidation parameters on physical properties of nanocrystalline nickel oxide thin films grown by two-step method: DC sputtering and plasma oxidation

F Hajakbari,S Rashvand,A Hojabri

doi:10.1007/s40094-019-00350-8

Abstract

Nanocrystalline nickel oxide (NiO) thin films were successfully grown on quartz substrates by two-step method. In the first step, nickel films were deposited on quartz substrates by DC magnetron sputtering technique. Then, the plasma oxidation of nickel films was used for preparation of nickel oxide. The effect of DC plasma power and treatment time on the structural, morphological and optical properties of the NiO films were investigated by different analyses. XRD results indicated that the plasma powers effectively influenced the structure of films, and the best crystallinity was obtained for plasma power of 15 w and treatment time of 20 min. The XPS, RBS and EDS analysis confirmed the presence of Ni and O elements. The FESEM and AFM images showed a granular structure with spherical shapes of grains. The optical band gap of the films synthesized under different plasma oxidation conditions was also discussed.

Highlights

X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern of the nickel oxide (NiO) films grown on quartz substrates at different plasma treatment powers and times are shown in Fig. 1a, b, respectively
The observed peaks at XRD spectra are sharp and high intense which confirms the well crystallization of the obtained NiO structures. These results clearly show that the plasma treatment power effectively influenced the structure of films
NiO thin films were prepared on quartz substrates using the plasma oxidation of Ni thin films

Summary

Introduction

The preparation and characterization of nanostructure nickel oxide (NiO) have gained considerable attentions of many scientists, due to excellent properties [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. The focus of the present work is to investigate the effect of plasma treatment time and power on structural, morphological and optical properties of NiO films. XRD pattern of the NiO films grown on quartz substrates at different plasma treatment powers and times are shown, b, respectively.

Results

Conclusion