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Highly Transparent and Low-Resistance Indium-Free ZnO/Ag/ZnO Multilayer Electrodes for Organic Photovoltaic Devices

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Abstract

We investigated the effect of ZnO layer thickness on the optical and electrical properties of ZnO/Ag/ZnO multilayer films deposited on glass substrates. The transmission window became wider and shifted toward the lower energy side with increasing ZnO thickness. The ZnO/Ag/ZnO (40 nm/18.8 nm/40 nm) multilayer sample showed transmittance of ~96% at 550nm. As the ZnO thickness was increased from 8 nm to 80 nm, the carrier concentration gradually decreased from 1.74 × 1022 cm−3 to 4.33 × 1021 cm−3, while the charge mobility varied from 23.8 cm2/V-s to 24.8 cm2/V-s. With increasing ZnO thickness, the samples exhibited similar sheet resistances of 3.6 Ω/sq to 3.9 Ω/sq, but the resistivity increased by a factor of 4.58. The samples showed smooth surfaces with root-mean-square roughness in the range of 0.47 nm to 0.94 nm. Haacke’s figure of merit (FOM) was calculated for all the samples; the ZnO (40 nm)/Ag (18.8 nm)/ZnO (40 nm) multilayer produced the highest FOM of 148.9 × 10−3 Ω−1.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Brain Korea 21 program funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, Korea and Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (Grant No. 10049601: Development of output coupling conductive substrate with light extraction efficiency up to 1.0 times). S.-K.K. was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (NRF-2013R1A1A1059423).

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Correspondence to Young-Zo Yoo or Tae-Yeon Seong.

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Kim, J.H., Na, JY., Kim, SK. et al. Highly Transparent and Low-Resistance Indium-Free ZnO/Ag/ZnO Multilayer Electrodes for Organic Photovoltaic Devices. J. Electron. Mater. 44, 3967–3972 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-015-3811-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-015-3811-8

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