Influence of temperature on optical properties of electron-beam-evaporated ZnSe thin film

Abstract

Structural and optical properties of ZnSe thin films grown by electron-beam evaporation technique were reported in the present paper. X-ray diffraction pattern exhibited a single peak around 27° which is well-suited with cubic phase of the films. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy analyses resulted in atomic composition ratio of Zn/Se nearly 1.0 which corresponds to the chemical formula of ZnSe. Transmission experiments were performed at various temperatures in between 10 and 300 K. The analyses of the transmission data showed that direct band gap energy of the ZnSe thin films increases from 2.72 to 2.83 eV as temperature was reduced to 10 K from room temperature. The Varshni and O’Donnell-Chen models giving the temperature-band gap energy relation were used to get various optical parameters of the evaporated thin films. Analyses resulted in absolute zero temperature band gap energy as 2.83 eV, temperature coefficient as −5.8 × 10–4 eV K−1 and average phonon energy as 16 meV. Urbach tail state energies were also calculated using absorption coefficient in the low photon energy region as increasing from 173 meV (300 K) to 181 meV (10 K) with decreasing ambient temperature.