Effect of film thickness on structural, electrical, and optical properties of Sol-Gel deposited layer-by-layer ZnO nanoparticles

Abstract

The structural, electrical, and optical properties of layer-by-layer ZnO nanoparticles deposited using sol-gel spin coating technique were studied and now presented. Thicknesses of the thin films were varied by increasing the number of deposited layers. As part of our characterization process, XRD and FE-SEM were used to characterize the structural properties, current-voltage measurements for the electrical properties, and UV-Vis spectra and photoluminescence spectra for the optical properties of the ZnO thin films. ZnO thin films with thicknesses ranging from 14.2 nm to 62.7 nm were used in this work. Film with thickness of 42.7 nm gave the lowest resistivity among all, 1.39×10-2 Ω·cm. Photoluminescence spectra showed two peaks which were in the UV emission centered at 380 nm, and visible emission centered at 590 nm. Optical transmittance spectra of the samples indicated that all films were transparent (>88%) in the visible-NIR range. The optical band gap energy was estimated to be 3.21~3.26 eV, with band gap increased with the thin film thickness. © 2012 KIEEME. All rights reserved.