Surface, structural and optical analysis of Fe doped nanocrystalline ZnO films as transducer

In this paper, nano crystalline Fe-doped ZnO films were prepared by spray pyrolysis on Si and Glass substrates. The influence of Fe on structural, optical and Electrical Conductance Studies has been discussed. The films were configured as capacitor and their behavior such as I-V and C-V characteristics were studied. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses show that all the ZnO thin films prepared in this work have a hexagonal wurtzite structure and are preferentially oriented along the c-axis perpendicular to the substrate surface. After 1 at% Fe is doped, the preferential orientation has improved but higher at%, it has weakened in-turn. The surface morphology analyses of the samples show that the ZnO grain sizes tend to increase with the increase of Fe-doping concentration. AFM images of the as-deposited films revealed that the particles are mono-dispersed with clearly spherical morphology and the area roughness was measured for all the samples. From the optical studies, transmittances of the films were found to be around 80%. With increase in Fe doping concentration the optical band gap energies of the films were found to shift (i.e. red-shift) to lower energies, indicating that the material is moving towards the conducting region. The I-V characteristics show INon linear indicating that the identical barriers at both contacts monitored in a two-point arrangements. C-V characteristics show that clearly the inversion, accumulation and depletions regions, indicating that this can be used as transducers.