Role of the double-glow plasma pre-sputtering in the growth mechanisms and metal–insulator transition of VO2 film

Abstract

High phase transition temperature and low utilization rate of sunlight of vanadium dioxide (VO2) have been an important obstacle to expand its application in smart semiconductor materials. In this paper, we propose a novel method by the double-glow plasma pre-sputtering to induce to generate a lot of surface vacancy defects/residual stresses, which can promote the high-quality growth of VO2 thin films on quartz substrates. The resultsshowed that the plasma pretreatment and annealing temperature affected the stability of phase structureto cause the formation of surface residual stresses of VO2films. The optical-electrical properties of the treated VO2 film indicated that the incident light at 2.5 μm has a great transmittance contrast of 63.25% and the solar transmittance modulation efficiency (ΔTsol) of 14.9 %before and after the phase transition. It is found that the metal–insulator phase transition temperature of VO2 after plasma treatment is 39.7℃, which is 20.4℃ lower than that of conventional VO2 film, greatly increases its application in intelligent windows and photoelectric fields. Our research provides an effective and low-cost approach to prepared high-quality VO2 thin films with low phase transition temperature and large-phase-transition amplitude on quartz substrate.