Fabrication of Nano-engineered Transparent Conducting Oxides by Pulsed Laser Deposition

Abstract

Nanosecond Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) in the presence of a background gas allows the deposition of metal oxides with tunable morphology, structure, density and stoichiometry by a proper control of the plasma plume expansion dynamics. Such versatility can be exploited to produce nanostructured films from compact and dense to nanoporous characterized by a hierarchical assembly of nano-sized clusters. In particular we describe the detailed methodology to fabricate two types of Al-doped ZnO (AZO) films as transparent electrodes in photovoltaic devices: 1) at low O 2 pressure, compact films with electrical conductivity and optical transparency close to the state of the art transparent conducting oxides (TCO) can be deposited at room temperature, to be compatible with thermally sensitive materials such as polymers used in organic photovoltaics (OPVs); 2) highly light scattering hierarchical structures resembling a forest of nano-trees are produced at higher pressures. Such structures show high Haze factor (>80%) and may be exploited to enhance the light trapping capability. The method here described for AZO films can be applied to other metal oxides relevant for technological applications such as TiO

Engineering plasmonic nanostructured surfaces by pulsed laser deposition

“…The effect of the background gas pressure at large pressures has been investigated in order to explore in-plume cluster generation phenomena. As a matter of fact, the large background gas pressure induces plume confinement, leading to cluster formation before landing on the substrate [25,36,40] as schematically illustrated in the inset of Figure 8b. Specifically, the number of shots has been finely varied from 50 up to 250 at 1000 Pa, and then an analysis of the average size of NPs, coverage and optical transmittance has been carried out.…”

“…In comparison to the aforementioned techniques, pulsed laser deposition (PLD) is known for high deposition rate with high kinetic energy species resulting in a promising approach to produce either NPs or continuous metallic and oxide films [22][23][24][25][26]. The former studies belong to Gonzalo et al [22], Donnelly et al [23] and Domingo et al [24] with the deposition of small (< 5 nm) Au NPs as SERS substrates, without investigating the effect of the numerous PLD parameters.…”

Electrophoretic Coating of Octahedral Molybdenum Metal Clusters for UV/NIR Light Screening

“…Numerous chemical solution deposition (CSD) techniques [13,14] and physical deposition techniques including sputtering and pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [15], which enable the fabrication of nano/micrometer-thick films, have been used in many fields to functionalize the surfaces of a variety of materials. For example, the PLD process is a versatile coating technique to fabricate thickness and nanostructure-controlled films with less contamination on a substrate [16,17]. Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is also a promising room temperature process which exhibits the capability to coat thin/thick films in ambient atmosphere on complex-shaped substrates such as tube, sphere and wire netting [18] and the applicability to any suspensions containing charged particles, i.e., conductive polymers [19], organic, inorganic, or organic-inorganic composites [20,21].…”

Multi-Aperture Shower Design for the Improvement of the Transverse Uniformity of MOCVD-Derived GdYBCO Films

“…At present, there are several main process methods to prepare REBCO films, such as pulsed laser deposition (PLD) [8,9], metal organic deposition (MOD) [10,11], sputtering [12], co-evaporation [13,14], and metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) [15,16,17,18]. The PLD technology is a very mature method to prepare high-quality films [9,19]. However, its drawbacks include high equipment requirements; for example, the laser renders this technique very expensive to apply to industrial-scale productions.…”