Abstract
Lead sulfide thin films were prepared by chemical bath deposition (CBD) on both glass and Si (100) substrates. XRD analysis of the PbS film deposited at 25°C showed that the prepared films have a polycrystalline structure with (200) preferential orientation. Larger grains could be obtained by increasing the deposition time. The prepared films were also chemically characterized using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), which confirmed the presence of lead and sulfur as PbS. While energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) technique was used to verify the stoichiometry of the prepared films. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to study the change in the films’ morphology with the deposition time. The effect of the deposition time, on both optical transmittance in the UV-Vis-NIR region and the structure of the film, was studied. The obtained results demonstrated that the optical band gap decreased when the thickness increased.
Highlights
Lead sulfide (PbS) has attracted great interest due to its enormous applications in the field of optoelectronics such as infrared (IR) detection [1], solar cell [2], quantum dots applications [3], and selective coating for photothermal conversion [4]
Chemical bath deposition is mostly used [8, 14,15,16,17] since it is a suitable method for the deposition of polycrystalline films, at low cost and good-quality films [18]
The deposition rate and the thickness of the films are controlled by changing the spray deposition parameters
Summary
Lead sulfide (PbS) has attracted great interest due to its enormous applications in the field of optoelectronics such as infrared (IR) detection [1], solar cell [2], quantum dots applications [3], and selective coating for photothermal conversion [4]. PbS is a semiconductor with direct narrow energy gap of 0.37–0.4 eV at room temperature. This energy gap becomes higher (1.6–2.44 eV) for nanocrystalline materials because the sizes of the crystallite become comparable to the Bohr excitonic radius, so this difference could be attributed to quantum confinement effect of PbS nanocrystals [5]. PbS thin films could be prepared using different methods [7,8,9] Such as pulsed laser ablation [10], spray pyrolysis [11], and chemical bath deposition (CBD) [12, 13]. The effect of the deposition time on the physical properties of the PbS thin films was evaluated
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