Phase Formation Behavior in Ultrathin Iron Oxide.

Abstract

Nanostructured iron oxides, and especially hematite, are interesting for a wide range of applications ranging from gas sensors to renewable solar hydrogen production. A promising method for deposition of low-dimensional films is atomic layer deposition (ALD). Although a potent technique, ALD of ultrathin films is critically sensitive to the substrate and temperature conditions where initial formation of islands and crystallites influences the properties of the films. In this work, deposition at the border of the ALD window forming a hybrid ALD/pulsed CVD (pCVD) deposition is utilized to obtain a deposition less sensitive to the substrate. A thorough analysis of iron oxide phases formation on two different substrates, Si(100) and SiO2, was performed. Films between 3 and 50 nm were deposited and analyzed with diffraction techniques, high-resolution Raman spectroscopy, and optical spectroscopy. Below 10 nm nominal film thickness, island formation and phase dependent particle crystallization impose constraints for deposition of phase pure iron oxides on non-lattice-matching substrates. Films between 10 and 20 nm thickness on SiO2 could effectively be recrystallized into hematite whereas for the corresponding films on Si(100), no recrystallization occurred. For films thicker than 20 nm, phase pure hematite can be formed directly with ALD/pCVD with very low influence of the substrate on either Si or SiO2. For more lattice matched substrates such as SnO2:F, Raman spectroscopy indicated formation of the hematite phase already for films with 3 nm nominal thickness and clearly for 6 nm films. Analysis of the optical properties corroborated the analysis and showed a quantum confined blue-shift of the absorption edge for the thinnest films.