Tailoring the structural and optical properties of RF magnetron sputtered ZnO/graphene thin films by annealing temperature

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ZnO and ZnO/Graphene thin films were deposited on Cu substrate using a low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) and the magnetron sputtering method. The impacts of graphene layer growth and annealing temperature on the optical properties ZnO and ZnO/Graphene thin films were investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic (XPS), and photoluminescence (PL) measurements respectively. XRD and SEM results reveal that all the thin films preferred the crystalline [001] orientation along the c-axis direction, which were vertical grown on substrate surface. By comparing the results and analysis of their structure, morphology, chemical bonding and optical property, it is proved that using Graphene as a buffer layer can improve the crystal quality of ZnO thin films. For the annealed ZnO/graphene nanostructures, the area ratio of UV and visible emission region of ZnO/graphene thin films increase with increasing the annealing temperature, reaches a maximum at 500 °C and then starts decreasing with further increase in annealing temperature, which indicating that the controllable ZnO/Graphene thin films have the higher crystallization quality at the annealing temperature of 500 °C. Our results demonstrate that for high quality ZnO/graphene thin films deposition, decreasing the defect concentration should be preferable to simply applying the proper annealing temperature, which might have promising applications for various UV photodetectors devices.