7thAsia-Pacific Conference on Plasma Physics, 12-17Nov,2023 at Port Messe Nagoya

Investigation of structural, optical and electrical properties of Zinc Oxide (ZnO)
thin film on Silicon (Si) substrate using RF Magnetron sputtering approach
1

Sumitra Choudhary1, Vikas Sharma2, Abhishek Sharma1
Department of Physics, JECRC University Jaipur, India, 2 Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israele-mail (speaker): abhishek.sharma@jecrcu.edu.in

In recent years, there is rapid increase in the number ofinvestigations on zinc oxide (ZnO) has been noticeable.
It is a promising material for variety of optoelectronic
and piezoelectric device applications because of its
unique properties especially wide band gap of 3.37 eVbased on investigation by Jandow et al. [1]. ZnO haslarge exciting binding energy of 60 eV at ambient
temperature as investigated by Umar et al. [2] which isuseful to for many applications. Also ensures its
suitability as photo detectors (UV), room temperatureLEDs, solar cells and gas sensors [3–6]. ZnO is widelyused as transparent conducting material in large numberof transparent conducting films (TCF’s). There aredifferent techniques such as sol–gel, thermal vapor
deposition, pulsed laser deposition, e-beam deposition
and RF sputtering has been reported for growing ZnO
thin films [7–10]. Among these methods, RF sputtering
is a very useful technique for the deposition of ZnO.
Because in RF sputtering technique, different parameterssuch as pressure, temperature, deposition time, gas flowrate and RF power can control the properties of grownthin films. The selection of substrate material is an
important factor required for the deposition of ZnO thinfilm. Different types of substrates that are used to deposit
ZnO thin films consist of PPC plastic [1], sapphire(Al2O3) [11], soda lime glass [12], Si [13], GaAs [14],and polyimide [15]. Here, we have deposited ZnO on Si(silicon) substrate and further we are going to fabricate
metal-dielectric multilayers for various optoelectronic
applications.
The objective of this work is to study the effect ofstructural, electrical and optical properties of ZnO thinfilms grown on silicon substrate. The structuralproperties were characterized by X-ray diffraction(XRD), surface analysis was done by using atomic force
microscopy (AFM), electrical properties by Hallmeasurements and optical properties were analysed byusing Raman spectroscopy.
In this research paper, we have successfully deposited
Zinc Oxide (ZnO) single layer of 100 nm on silicon (Si)substrate using radio frequency magnetron sputtering
approach. Base pressure of 1.0×10−5 mbar, RF power of100W at Ar flow 15sccm and room temperature weretaken as process parameters. In characterization of ZnOlayer deposited on Silicon substrate, X-Ray diffraction(XRD) confirms the crystalline nature of ZnO withdifferent sharp peaks and average crystallite size wasfound to be 108.16 nm using Scherrer’s formula. The
average surface roughness (Ra) and root mean squareroughness (Rq) of ZnO were 2.75 nm and 3.70 nm

respectively using Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)
technique. The resistivity and sheet resistance of the ZnO
layer were characterized by Hall measurements at room
temperature. The sheet resistance of the layer wasmeasured to be 7.05×103 Ω/sq and resistivity was
7.05×10−2 Ωcm. Raman and Photoluminescence
spectroscopy were used to analyse optical properties. PL
signal detects the emission peak of the ZnO deposited onsilicon substrate corresponds to 380.30 nm (Eg = 3.26eV). The results exhibited that the Zinc Oxide (ZnO) thinfilm grown on Silicon substrate (Si), ZnO/Si has goodquality.
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