A simple route for spray deposition of ZnO thin films embedded with Ag nanoparticles: influence of Ag concentration on t
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A simple route for spray deposition of ZnO thin films embedded with Ag nanoparticles: influence of Ag concentration on the structural, morphological, optical, and photoluminescence properties Hassan Zare Asl1 · Seyed Mohammad Rozati2 Received: 27 April 2020 / Accepted: 13 July 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Ag nanoparticles (NPs) were embedded in the spray-deposited ZnO thin films by simply adding A gNO3 to the stating solution. The Ag concentration was varied by adding 0, 2, 4, 6, and 10 wt% of AgNO3 to the precursor. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern of the prepared films indicates the presence of both the Ag NPs with cubic structure and the ZnO thin films with hexagonal wurtzite structure. According to the field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) of the surface and cross-section images, the Ag NPs are almost spherical with the average diameter of 65 nm to 99 nm depending on the Ag concentration. The ZnO thin films embedded with Ag NPs exhibit absorption peak around 500 nm, which is related to the Ag NPs surface plasmon (SP). There are two absorption edges in the transmittance spectra of the embedded films, which correspond to the bandgap of ZnO (~ 3.26 eV) and SP of Ag NPs. The photoluminescence (PL) spectra reveal that as the Ag concentration increases, the 395 nm emission related to the Zn vacancies reduces, whereas the yellow emission (570 nm) results from the coupling of ZnO excitons and Ag NPs SP increases.
1 Introduction ZnO thin films have numerous practical characteristics and the feasibility of deposition with almost all conventional techniques. Therefore, they are widely utilized in many technological applications such as solar cells [1], heterojunction diodes [2], thin film transistors [3], gas sensors [4], photocatalysts [5], transparent conductive oxides [6], and piezoelectric transducers [7]. Among all conventional techniques, spray pyrolysis is a vacuum-free solution-based, cost-effective, and easy-to-use method [8]. Accordingly, during the last decades, there have been numerous studies on employing spray pyrolysis technique and depositing ZnO thin films with desirable characteristics. To achieve these properties, these methods adjust the deposition parameters such as temperature [9], carrier gas pressure [10], nozzlesubstrate distance [11], and solution properties [12].
* Hassan Zare Asl [email protected] 1
Department of Physics, Behbahan Khatam Alanbia University of Technology, Behbahan, Iran
Department of Physics, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran
2
Furthermore, there are a large number of studies on promoting the intrinsic characteristics of the ZnO thin films by adding proper impurities such as Al [13], In [6], Ga [14], Co [15], and Fe [16] to the structure. To the best knowledge of authors, however, there are scarce studies in which a simple and cost-effective method has been used to deposit ZnO thin film embedded with Ag NPs and investigate the influence of embedding Ag NPs. Ag NPs are well known for their uni
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