Structure, microstructure and optical properties of Sn-doped ZnO thin films

Synthesis and characterization of nanostructured undoped and Sn-doped ZnO thin films via sol–gel approach

“…% Sn doped ZnO film, a parameter of lattice increases with Sn dopant. This is due to the lattice expansion induced the ionic radii of Sn.The obtained lattice parameters of Sn doped ZnO films are in agreement with the parameters of Sn doped ZnO films prepared by spray pyrolysis method[22][23].The grain size and morphology properties of the nanostructure films were studied by atomic force microscopy (AFM), as shown inFig.2(a,b,c,d,e,f) , respectively. As seen in AFM images of the films, the films are formed from the fibers consisted of the nanoparticles.…”

“…It is seen I Table 2 that the crystallite size is decreased except for 2% Sn with the increase in Sn content. The lattice parameter of the films are determined by the following relation [8,11,22] :…”

“…Among metal oxide semiconductors, Zinc oxide (ZnO) has been extensively investigated due to its excellent physical properties and applications in commercial and scientific devices [1,[3][4][5][6][7]. This II-VI group n-type semiconductor is also one of the most important materials for the next generation devices [5] with a wide bandgap (3.37 eV) [1,2,8,9,[11][12][13]18], large exciton binding energy (60 meV) [10][11][12][13][14]18], low resistivity and high transparency in the visible range and high light trapping characteristics [8].…”

“…This II-VI group n-type semiconductor is also one of the most important materials for the next generation devices [5] with a wide bandgap (3.37 eV) [1,2,8,9,[11][12][13]18], large exciton binding energy (60 meV) [10][11][12][13][14]18], low resistivity and high transparency in the visible range and high light trapping characteristics [8]. Due to these properties, this material is of considerable interest for practical applications such as photonic devices [15], gas sensors [3,8,9,15,16] and dye-sensitized solar cells [3,9,15,16,18] light emitting diodes (LED's), laser systems [3], transparent electrodes [3,8,9], piezoelectric device [8,16], flexible displays [17], surface acoustic wave devices (SAW) [9,16]. However, the surface conductance of the this material is changed with oxygen chemisorptions and adsorptions.…”

“…Among metal ions, Sn is used to enhance the field emission, conductivity and luminescence properties of ZnO [1]. Metal oxide semiconductors have been prepared using the various techniques such as RF/DC magnetic sputtering deposition [5,10,17], sol-gel method [2,3,17,19], MOCVD [5], chemical vapor deposition [5,10,17,19], pulsed laser deposition(PLD) [3,5,10,17], spray pyrolysis [2,3,5,17],etc. The sol gel spin coating method has some advantages such as low cost and easy preparation of metal oxide semiconductors.…”