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Structural, optical and Urbach energy properties of ITO/CdS and ITO/ZnO/CdS bi-layer thin films

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Abstract

The thin films of ITO/CdS and ITO/ZnO/CdS bi-layer have been fabricated and studied for structural, morphological, optical, and Urbach energy properties. ZnO thin films were coated onto ITO plated glass slides by a spin-coating method and CdS thin films by electron beam evaporation method. X-Ray Diffraction patterns of both ITO/CdS and ITO/ZnO/CdS thin films confirmed the hexagonal wurtzite structure of ZnO and hexagonal structure of CdS, respectively. AFM images show better uniformity and bigger grain size in the case of OTO/ZnO/CdS samples. Optical transmittance spectra show a slight redshift (~ 493 nm to ~ 505 nm) for the film ITO/ZnO/CdS compared to ITO/CdS. Urbach energy was calculated for all the samples to study the structural imperfections leading to the band tails. A decrease in Urbach energy is observed for ITO/ZnO/CdS compared to ITO/CdS. The obtained results indicate that the ITO/ZnO/CdS thin films are more suitable for optoelectronic devices compared to ITO/CdS films. The results obtained are discussed in detail and presented in this paper.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Also, we declare that “no funds, grants, or other support was received” to carry out this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, SSIT, Sri Siddhartha Academy of Higher Education, Tumakuru, 572107, India

    M. Nagaraja

  2. Department of Electronics, Govt. First Grade College Kuvempunagar, Mysore, 570023, India

    P. Raghu

  3. Department of Electronic Science, Bangalore University, Bengaluru, 560056, India

    H. M. Mahesh

  4. School of Physics, REVA University, Bengaluru, 560064, India

    Jayadev Pattar

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  1. M. Nagaraja
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Nagaraja, M., Raghu, P., Mahesh, H.M. et al. Structural, optical and Urbach energy properties of ITO/CdS and ITO/ZnO/CdS bi-layer thin films. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 32, 8976–8982 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-021-05568-4

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