## 4 Conclusions  
In this work, vanadium oxide thin films were deposited by gas impulse magnetron sputtering with the same conditions, except for varying ratios of the working gas (Ar) and reactive gas (O\({}_{2}\)) that were in the range of 8:1 to 2:1. Because of the low temperature of the substrates during the sputtering process, the deposited coatings were amorphous, which was favorable in the case of analysis of other properties; i.e., there was no influence of the structure on the optical, electrical, gas sensing, and nanomechanical properties. It was shown that changing the gas ratio during the deposition process leads to a change in the transparency of the thin films from ca. 51% to 22% with an increase in argon in the gas composition. However, such large changes in the gas ratio, i.e., from 2:1 to 8:1,  
Figure 13: Results of (**a**) the hardness measurement for selected thin films and (**b**) the dependence of hardness of vanadium oxide thin films on the Ar:O\({}_{2}\) gas ratio during the sputtering process.  
did not strongly influence the optical energy band gap. In turn, in the case of electrical properties, all the thin films had semiconducting characteristics and could be categorized as transparent oxide semiconducting (TOS) materials. Taking into consideration their average transparency in the visible wavelength range and resistivity, it was found that thin films with the best merit of figure were deposited with a rather low Ar:O\({}_{2}\) ratio of 3:1. It is also interesting that samples deposited with a high Ar:O\({}_{2}\) ratio were \(p\)-type semiconductors, while decreasing the gas ratio during sputtering resulted in a change to the electron conduction type. Moreover, gas-sensing measurements in the diluted hydrogen showed that the \(p\)-type thin films had a better response than the \(n\)-type samples. Hardness was also shown to gradually decrease with a decrease in the Ar:O\({}_{2}\) gas ratio during the sputtering process. In summary, it is worth highlighting that, with careful control of the sputtering atmosphere, it is possible to obtain amorphous vanadium oxides with specified optical and electrical properties. Increasing the argon content in the gas ratio leads to the deposition of p-type thin films with visible gas sensing properties towards diluted hydrogen and high hardness, while increasing the oxygen content produces thin films with high transparency, good resistivity and a high figure of merit. Further studies will focus on the determination of the oxidation state of each thin film and investigating the influence of post-process annealing on their properties.  
Conceptualization, M.M.; methodology, M.M. and A.L.; formal analysis, M.M., A.L. and J.D.; investigation, M.M., A.L. and D.W.; resources, M.M.; data curation, M.M. and A.L.; writing--original draft preparation, M.M., A.L., J.D. and D.W.; writing--review and editing, M.M. and A.L.; visualization, M.M.; supervision, M.M.; project administration, M.M.; funding acquisition, M.M. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This work was co-financed from the sources given by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) as a research project number UMO-2020/39/D/ST5/00424 in the years 2021-2024.  
Not applicable.  
The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.  
The authors would like to thank [PERSON] for the hardness measurements of deposited thin films.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.