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High electron mobility of epitaxial ZnO thin films on c-plane sapphire grown by multistep pulsed-laser deposition
A multistep pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) process is presented for epitaxial, nominally undoped ZnO thin films of total thickness of 1 to 2 μm on c-plane sapphire substrates. We obtain reproducibly high electron mobilities from 115 up to 155 cm2/V s at 300 K in a narrow carrier concentration range f...
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Published in: | Applied physics letters 2003-06, Vol.82 (22), p.3901-3903 |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Citations: | Items that this one cites Items that cite this one |
Online Access: | Get full text |
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Summary: | A multistep pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) process is presented for epitaxial, nominally undoped ZnO thin films of total thickness of 1 to 2 μm on c-plane sapphire substrates. We obtain reproducibly high electron mobilities from 115 up to 155 cm2/V s at 300 K in a narrow carrier concentration range from 2 to 5×1016 cm−3. The key issue of the multistep PLD process is the insertion of 30-nm-thin ZnO relaxation layers deposited at reduced substrate temperature. The high-mobility samples show atomically flat surface structure with grain size of about 0.5–1 μm, whereas the surfaces of low-mobility films consist of clearly resolved hexagonally faceted columnar grains of only 200-nm size, as shown by atomic force microscopy. Structurally optimized PLD ZnO thin films show narrow high-resolution x-ray diffraction peak widths of the ZnO(0002) ω- and 2Θ-scans as low as 151 and 43 arcsec, respectively, and narrow photoluminescence linewidths of donor-bound excitons of 1.7 meV at 2 K. |
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ISSN: | 0003-6951 1077-3118 |
DOI: | 10.1063/1.1578694 |