Electronic conduction properties of silver particles in cesium oxide

The electronic conductivity of a particular metallic particles/semiconductor system, i.e. Ag particles in cesium-oxide thin film, has been studied. The experimental results show a transition from a polycrystalline semiconductor to metallic behavior as characterized by the conductivity-temperature curve (log bs 1/T), and a five order of magnitude increase in the room temperature value of the conductivity with surface Ag content increasing from an equivalent thickness of 2Å to 20Å. It was observed by TEM that the deposited Ag was mainly in the form of dispersed particles with the particle size varying from 20 to 200Å and their separations varying from hundreds to tens of angstroms over the Ag content range. These results can hardly be explained with the model of direct electron tunneling through the Schottky barrier at the Ag-particle/cesium-oxide interface. A microstructure model with two conduction layers is presented, and an analogy to the hopping conduction mechanism is proposed to explain the electronic conduction behavior. This model predicts that the attenuation length for electronic wavefunctions localized at Ag particles falls in the range 20–50Å.