Structural, Optical, Electrical and Mechanical Properties of ZnO Co-doped Ag, Mg Thin Films: Annealing Temperature Effect

Abstract

In this work, ZnO-Ag-Mg layers were developed by thermal evaporation (at high temperature and very low pressure) of powder mixtures of zinc oxide, magnesium and silver with a respective mass percentages (80-10-10)%. The deposited layers on glass substrate were investigated with respect to effect of annealing temperature after deposition on the evolution of structural, optical, electrical and mechanical properties of the layers was investigated. It has been shown that after annealing at 300°C, zinc oxide (ZnO) begins to crystallize with hexagonal wurtzite structure which increases the material’s cristallinity with annealing temperature. The transmittance of the layers increases with temperature to a maximum of 75% while a change of the electrical properties from a conductive layer with 14.29 Ω of resistance value towards a semiconductor layer with resistances around 225 kΩ. Also, it was noticed that the resistance to plastic deformation (Hardness) of the layers does not respect the hall-Petch rule due to very small grain size of less than 100 nm.