Preparation and characterization of Al and Mn doped ZnO (ZnO: (Al,Mn)) transparent conducting oxide films

This paper presents the electro-optical, chemical and structural properties of doped-ZnO films deposited by DC-reactive magnetron sputtering at room temperature using the bi-dopant Al and Mn. A minimum resistivity of 3.46×10⁻⁴ Ω cm, exceeding 75.0% average transmittance (380–800 nm), and fundamental band gap of 3.48±0.01 eV have been obtained. XPS analyses show that Zn uniformly remains in the valence state of Zn²⁺; all of the Al and a little amount of Mn with valence state of Mn⁴⁺ are supposed to have donor effect, while dominant Mn²⁺ will induce to form more oxygen vacancies and this proposal has been verified by O 1s XPS results. It has been concluded that the presence of more oxygen vacancies will attenuate the effect of hybridization of p–d orbitals in the matrix of ZnO. It has been found that all the as-deposited films have c-axis preferred orientation with flat and smooth surface (RMS surface roughness is of the order of ∼3 nm over 5×5 μm² area).