Effect of oxygen and temperature on zinc oxide thin films grown by reactive magnetron sputtering method

Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a material that is frequently used in optoelectronic technology, which is rapidly developing with its transparent conductive oxide (TCO) feature in the semiconductor industry. In this thesis, the dependence of ZnO thin films grown by reactive radio frequency magnetic field sputtering to the oxygen and substrate temperature in the environment during growth was evaluated in terms of their structural and optical properties. When the findings obtained as a result of the X-ray diffraction pattern analyzes were examined, it was concluded that all the films were in the hexagonal wurtzite structure with high orientation and this was not dependent on the amount of O2. In addition, Raman spectra confirm the existence of wurtzite structure. At the same time, it was determined that all samples had high permeability and the film thicknesses decreased with the increase in temperature. Field-effect scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) results showed that the particles in the films did not change much at room temperature, 100 oC and 200 oC, but the films grown at 300 oC showed inhomogeneous particle growth. However, this situation decreases as O2 increases. The optical band gap for all films was determined as ⁓3.25 eV. This study presented a comprehensive optimization of thin-film zinc oxide structures, which are widely used in optoelectronics.