Study of humidity sensing properties and ion beam induced modifications in SnO2-TiO2 nanocomposite thin films

Abstract

Swift heavy ion beam induced dense electronic excitation in the nanocomposite thin film is a unique way to introduce various modifications such as track formation, atomic transport and phase transformation. Therefore, this work based on the modification in the properties of Titanium dioxide and Tin oxide nanocomposite thin films prepared by RF sputtering deposition technique in the mol% 50:50 on ITO coated glass and silicon substrates. The prepared nanocomposite thin films annealed at 500 °C and irradiated with SHI of 150 MeV Fe11+ ion beam with varied ion fluences ranging from 5 × 1012to 5 × 1013 ions.cm−2. The SRIM simulation was confirmed the electronic energy loss (Se) as 1.038 × 102 eV/nm, nuclear energy loss (Sn) as 1.33 × 10−1 eV/nm and the projectile depth of the iron ion inside the thin films was founded to be 17.18 um. Structural analyses of pristine and irradiated thin films were analyzed by X-ray diffraction technique. Changes observed in the peak intensity were confirmed by the significant variations in crystallite size, which was calculated by the Debye Scherrer equation. The crystallite size of all samples was found to be improved from 59 nm to 141 nm. The influence of ion irradiation on surface topography of nanocomposite thin films was analyzed by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). The sectional analysis of AFM images reveals that the grain size depends on the ion irradiation fluences. The grain size was increased from 52 nm to 129 nm. The optical properties were studied using UV–Visible spectroscopy and Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. Tauc's method was used to calculate the optical energy band gap of the samples. The direct band gap was decreased as ion fluence increases may be due to creation of metastable energy states in between the valance and conduction band. The recombination and separation of photo generated charge carriers were studied by the photoluminescence spectroscopy. Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) was performed on all samples to ensure depth profiling, elemental composition and absence of impurities in titanium dioxide and tin oxide nanocomposite thin films. The response time, recovery time, repeatability and ageing effect after (one, two and three) weeks of nanocomposite thin films were obtained during humidity sensing measurements.