## 2 Materials and Methods  
The ZnO thin films were deposited on commercially available silicon wafers (cut 5 \(\times\) 5 mm) using an ArF laser with a wavelength of 193 nm (Coherent COMPex Pro 205F) by ablating a sintered ZnO target in high purity (99.999%) oxygen atmosphere. ZnO target was sintered from ZnO high purity powder (Sigma Aldrich) and baked for 12 h at a temperature of 1100 \({}^{\circ}\)C. The laser repetition rate can be varied from 1 to 50 Hz, and the energy per pulse can be set in the range of 10 to 400 mJ. For this study, the laser was operated at a frequency of 10 Hz with a constant power of 300 mJ. The experimental apparatus consists of a vacuum chamber that can be evacuated to a base pressure of 4 \(\times\) 10\({}^{-7}\) mbar with the help of a rotary pump coupled with a turbomolecular one as seen in Figure 1. Before being loaded in the chamber and mounted on the sample holder, the substrates were ultrasonically cleaned with ethanol for at least 30 min and dried in air.  
The temperature of the substrate during deposition can be varied from room temperature to a maximum of 800 \({}^{\circ}\)C. To remove the contaminants from the surface of the target, before each deposition, the target is cleaned by ablation operating the laser for 5000 pulses. Inside the vacuum chamber, the targets can be mounted on a carousel that can accommodate a maximum number of 6 different targets and that can be operated automatically for multi-layer deposition of various materials. During operation, the target is rotated and has a translational movement as well to maintain the uniformity of the target surface and also the stoichiometry of the deposited thin films. In this study, for each condition, multiple batches of samples were prepared. Since the plasma plume volume is limited, for the uniformity of the films and reproducibility of the experiments, only four substrates are mounted at a time on the heated sample holder. The surface of the target is republished after each deposition to keep it flat. In all cases, the distance between target and substrate was kept constant at 5 cm. The schematic diagram of the experimental setup is depicted in Figure 1. In all conditions, the deposition took place at 50,000 pulses, thus, despite changing the substrate temperature in the mentioned range, the deposition rate is similar for all studied cases.  
The crystallographic structure of the deposited thin films was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) using a Shimadzu LabX XRD 6000 Diffractometer system with a CuK\({}_{\alpha}\) (\(\lambda\) = 1.5406 A) source. The surface morphology was investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) (Quanta 450, FEI, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Hillsboro, OR, USA). The samples were analyzed as they were, the system being able to image conductive and non-conductive samples as well without any prior preparation. The elemental composition analysis was performed with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) module coupled with an SEM machine (EDAX, Ametek Inc., Berwyn, PA, USA). Absorbance measurements were obtained with a UV-VIS spectrophotometer (Thermo Scientific Evolution 300, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Hillsboro, OR, USA). Each of the above-mentioned measurements were performed on at least three of the samples for each experiment.