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Thermal stability of amorphous Zn-In-Sn-O films

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Abstract

Isochronal annealing of amorphous Zn and Sn codoped In2O3 (a-ZITO) films was performed at the Synchrotron so that to extract, in situ, important kinetic nucleation and growth parameters from a single constant-rate heating experiment. First, amorphous Zn and Sn codoped In2O3 films were deposited via pulsed laser deposition and subjected to post-deposition annealing treatments to study their stability against crystallization. Crystallization on glass and ĉ-sapphire occurred near the same temperature, however higher codoping levels resulted in increased crystallization temperatures. Post-deposition anneal crystallization temperatures were found to be higher than the substrate temperatures required to grow crystalline films during deposition. Then, a-ZITO films were subjected to a constant temperature ramp during in situ grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction experiments. Crystallization of films on both glass and ĉ-sapphire showed similar gradual crystallization behavior between 300 and 345 °C and strong (111) texturing, which suggests the influence of surface energy minimization during crystallization. The activation energy was found to be 2.87 eV using Johnson-Mehl-Avrami analysis. This work presents the advantages of in situ experiments to study nucleation and growth during crystallization of transparent conducting oxides.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the MRSEC program of the National Science Foundation (DMR-1121262). A portion of the work done by DBB and RPHC was also supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-FG02-06ER46320. Portions of this work were performed at the DuPont-Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team (DND-CAT) located at Sector 5 of the Advanced Photon Source (APS). DND-CAT is supported by E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., The Dow Chemical Company and Northwestern University. Use of the APS, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory, was supported by the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. This work made use of the J.B.Cohen X-Ray Diffraction Facility supported by the MRSEC program of the National Science Foundation (DMR-1121262) at the Materials Research Center of Northwestern University. DEP acknowledges support of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Diana E. Proffit, Thomas Philippe, Jonathan D. Emery, Bruce D. Buchholz, Peter W. Voorhees, Michael J. Bedzyk, Robert P. H. Chang & Thomas O. Mason

  2. Groupe de Physique des Matériaux (GPM), Normandie Université, UMR CNRS 6634 BP 12, Avenue de l’Université, 76801, Saint Etienne du Rouvray, France

    Thomas Philippe

  3. DND-CAT, Northwestern Synchrotron Research Center at Advanced Photon Source, Argonne, IL, 60439, USA

    Qing Ma

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Michael J. Bedzyk

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  1. Diana E. Proffit
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Correspondence to Thomas Philippe.

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Proffit, D.E., Philippe, T., Emery, J.D. et al. Thermal stability of amorphous Zn-In-Sn-O films. J Electroceram 34, 167–174 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10832-014-9967-4

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