Abstract
The tuning of structural, optical, and electrical properties of Al-doped ZnO films deposited by atomic layer deposition technique is reported in this work. With the increasing Al doping level, the evolution from (002) to (100) diffraction peaks indicates the change in growth mode of ZnO films. Spectroscopic ellipsometry has been applied to study the thickness, optical constants, and band gap of AZO films. Due to the increasing carrier concentration after Al doping, a blue shift of band gap and absorption edge can be observed, which can be interpreted by Burstein-Moss effect. The carrier concentration and resistivity are found to vary significantly among different doping concentration, and the optimum value is also discussed. The modulations and improvements of properties are important for Al-doped ZnO films to apply as transparent conductor in various applications.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11671-016-1625-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
A transparent conductive oxide (TCO) has received considerable attentions and been widely used in electronic and optoelectronic devices [1], such as solar cells [2], liquid crystal [3], and high-definition displays [4], due to their low resistivity and high transmittance
The scarce and toxic nature of indium and instability of indium tin oxide (ITO) are the main obstacles for its further development, which arouses the interests of researchers to explore alternative TCO materials for ITO
Composition and Structure Analysis To verify the concentration of Al doping, the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurement was carried out on Al-doped ZnO films
Summary
A transparent conductive oxide (TCO) has received considerable attentions and been widely used in electronic and optoelectronic devices [1], such as solar cells [2], liquid crystal [3], and high-definition displays [4], due to their low resistivity and high transmittance. There are various TCO materials, including In, Sb, Zn, Cd, Sn metal oxides, and their composite oxides. Indium tin oxide (ITO) film is the most widely used TCO material [5]. The scarce and toxic nature of indium and instability of ITO are the main obstacles for its further development, which arouses the interests of researchers to explore alternative TCO materials for ITO. As a candidate for TCO, ZnO films doped with trivalent metal cations have attracted considerable attentions [6,7,8,9]. Thereinto, Al-doped ZnO (AZO) film is one of the most promising candidates [10], since it has many
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