Study of undoped and indium doped ZnO thin films deposited by sol gel method

Abstract

In this paper, we report the effects of Indium doping concentrations (from 0 to 10wt%) on the structural, morphological, and optical properties of deposited In doped ZnO (IZO) thin films prepared by the sol–gel method through the dip coating technique. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis indicates that all ZnO thin films have a polycrystalline nature with a hexagonal wurtzite phase with (002) as a preferential orientation. XRD results demonstrate that the particle size of ZnO decreased with the increase in Indium concentrations. Raman scattering spectra confirmed the wurtzite phase and the presence of intrinsic defects in our samples. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements, confirmed the presence of zinc, oxygen and indium elements which is in agreement with XPS results. The photoluminescence (PL) spectra of the films exhibit defects-related visible emission peaks, with intensities differing owing to different concentrations of zinc vacancies. UV–Vis spectrometer measurements show that all the films are highly transparent in the visible wavelength region (≥ 70%) and presented two different absorption edges at about 3.21 eV and 3.7 eV, these may be correspond to the band gap of zinc oxide and indium oxide respectively.