The compensation source in nitrogen doped ZnO

Abstract

Nitrogen doped zinc oxide (ZnO) films have been prepared by molecular beam epitaxy. The as-grown samples show n-type conduction, but they convert to p-type after being annealed in O2 atmosphere. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals that the conversion is mainly caused by the escaping of substituted N molecule (N2)O donors from the films, and photoluminescence spectroscopy confirms the extraction of (N2)O. The work shown in this paper reveals experimentally that the main compensation source in nitrogen doped ZnO is (N2)O donors instead of intrinsic donors or background impurities, and annealing in oxygen may be a promising route to p-ZnO.

Raman investigation of N‐implanted ZnO: Defects, disorder and recovery

“…In literature, N‐induced modifications of defects/defect complexes in ZnO have been investigated using different spectroscopic techniques . The Raman mode near 275 cm −1 is known to be due to atomic nitrogen in the vacant oxygen sites (N O ) in ZnO .…”

Effect of substrate temperature on the properties of pyrolytically deposited nitrogen-doped zinc oxide thin films

“…All these results show the high efficiency of SPT in depositing the p-type ZnO films compared with other deposition techniques like: sol-gel [45], chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [46][47][48], sputtering [49], atomic layer deposition (ALD) [11,50] and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) [13,51].…”

“…However, this hindrance has been overcome by the selection of deposition techniques. Among the successful deposition techniques [10][11][12][13] in obtaining p-type ZnO, spray pyrolysis technique (SPT) made significant contribution with encouraging results [14][15][16][17][18][19]. However, achieving the final goal of producing stable ptype ZnO remains huge challenge.…”

Nitrogen doped-ZnO/n-GaN heterojunctions

“…1,3,4 Among different possible acceptor dopants for ZnO, nitrogen has been regarded as one of the most suitable acceptors due to its similar atomic size and electronic structure to oxygen, 3 and hence, it has been extensively studied. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] However, p-type conductivity in N:ZnO remains controversial. 3,4 Recent theoretical calculations indicated that nitrogen is a deep acceptor, 5 although hole binding energy derived from PL experiments on N:ZnO was comparable to that observed for Mg in GaN, 4 indicating that nitrogen is a shallow acceptor.…”

“…In addition to other compensating donors present in undoped ZnO, nitrogen molecules at an oxygen site (N 2 ) O are also donors, 3,4,7,8 so that the choice of nitrogen source has a significant influence on the doping. P-type conductivity in N:ZnO, grown by variety of methods and with different nitrogen sources, has been reported to date.…”