In-situ preparation of metal oxide thin films by inkjet printing acetates solutions
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‘in-situ’ preparation of metal oxide thin films by inkjet printing acetates solutions Mei Fang,1,2 Wolfgang Voit,2 Yan Wu,3 Lyubov Belova2 and K.V. Rao2 1
Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China Department of Materials Science and Engineering, KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, SE10044, Sweden 3 Faculty of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China 2
ABSTRACT Direct printing of functional oxide thin films could provide a new route to low-cost, efficient and scalable fabrications of electronic devices. One challenge that remains open is to design the inks with long term stability for effective deposition of specific oxide materials of industrial importance. In this paper, we introduce a reliable method of producing stable inks for ‘in-situ’ deposition of oxide thin films by inkjet printing. The inks were prepared from metalacetates solutions and printed on a variety of substrates. The acetate precursors were decomposed into oxide films during the subsequent calcination process to achieve the ‘in-situ’ deposition of the desired oxide films directly on the substrate. By this procedure we have obtained room temperature contamination free ferromagnetic spintronic materials like Fe doped MgO and ZnO films from their acetate(s) solutions. We find that the origin of magnetism in ZnO, MgO and their Fe-doped films to be intrinsic. For a 28 nm thick film of Fe-doped ZnO we observe an enhanced magnetic moment of 16.0 emu/cm3 while it is 5.5 emu/cm3 for the doped MgO film of single pass printed. The origin of magnetism is attributed to cat-ion vacancies. We have also fabricated highly transparent indium tin oxide films with a transparency >95% both in the visible and IR range which is rather unique compared to films grown by any other technique. The films have a nano-porous structure, an added bonus from inkjetting that makes such films advantageous for a broad range of applications. INTRODUCTION As an efficient, inexpensive and scalable technique, inkjet printing offers an ideal answer to the emerging trends and demands of depositing small volume (in picoliter range) droplets of precursor liquid inks into functional thin films and device components with a high degree of pixel precision. Compared to other techniques of film deposition, this method is fast, simple, precise, material-saving and suitable for any type of substrates, a promising advantage for new flexible and/or stretchable electronics. Thus, of late, inkjet technology have been used for fabrications of different materials for various applications, including organic transistor circuits,1-5 polymer displays,6 metallic nanoparticles for flexible electronics,7-9 organic solar cells,10-12 patterning of biomolecules, cells and tissues for biomedicine applications13, 14, and many more.15, 16 One of the remaining challenges of developing inkjet materials deposition for these applications is the fabrication of inks suitable for printing inorganic materials. Some specific physicochemic
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