Synthesis and Properties of Metal Oxide Thin Films

A special issue of Nanomaterials (ISSN 2079-4991). This special issue belongs to the section "Synthesis, Interfaces and Nanostructures".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 14 March 2025 | Viewed by 1753

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, E-28049 Madrid, Spain
Interests: thin films; magnetron sputtering; metal oxides; x-ray absorption; ion-induced surface patterning; ion beam analysis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Nanostructured thin films have attracted a great deal of interest in recent decades due to their unique, size-dependent, physicochemical properties. This trend has been accompanied with a parallel development of thin film manufacturing technology, enabling the production of advanced thin film architectures and their application in a wide range of fields. The list of potential applications is practically endless, with an impact being had in nearly every industrial sector.

One of the hottest current research topics is the design and development of metal oxide thin films with tailored properties suitable for applications in different fields, including (opto-) electronics, (photo-) catalysis, (bio-) sensing, photovoltaic cells, spintronic, (bio-) medicine, surfaces with special characteristics like biomimetic surfaces, smart patterned surfaces, surfaces with controlled wettability, and so on.

Consequently, taking into account the multidisciplinary aspect of the research area of nanomaterials, this Special Issue welcomes the submission of research articles or reviews focused on the synthesis, characterization, and/or applications of metal oxide thin films. Topics of special interest include emerging applications as well as novel approaches for synthetizing metal oxide structures upon doping, nanostructuring, heterostructure assembling, etc. We invite authors from leading groups in the field to contribute, with the aim of providing a balanced view of the current state of the art in this discipline.

Dr. Raúl Gago
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • nanostructured thin films
  • metal oxide
  • design and synthesis
  • surfaces with special characteristics
  • electronics

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 9752 KiB  
Article
Impact of Silver Incorporation and Flash-Lamp-Annealing on the Photocatalytic Response of Sputtered ZnO Films
by Leo Álvarez-Fraga, Raúl Gago, David G. Calatayud, Slawomir Prucnal and Olga Sánchez
Nanomaterials 2024, 14(18), 1519; https://doi.org/10.3390/nano14181519 - 19 Sep 2024
Viewed by 477
Abstract
Thin films of silver-doped zinc oxide (SZO) were deposited at room temperature using a DC reactive magnetron co-sputtering technique using two independent Zn and Ag targets. The crystallographic structure, chemical composition and surface morphology of SZO films with different silver concentrations were correlated [...] Read more.
Thin films of silver-doped zinc oxide (SZO) were deposited at room temperature using a DC reactive magnetron co-sputtering technique using two independent Zn and Ag targets. The crystallographic structure, chemical composition and surface morphology of SZO films with different silver concentrations were correlated with the photocatalytic (PC) properties. The crystallization of the SZO films was made using millisecond range flash-lamp-annealing (FLA) treatments. FLA induces significant structural ordering of the wurtzite structure and an in-depth redistribution of silver, resulting in the formation of silver agglomerates. The wurtzite ZnO structure is observed for silver contents below 10 at.% where Ag is partially incorporated into the oxide matrix, inducing a decrease in the optical band-gap. Regardless of the silver content, all the as-grown SZO films do not exhibit any significant PC activity. The best PC response is achieved for samples with a relatively low Ag content (2–5 at.%) after FLA treatment. The enhanced PC activity of SZO upon FLA can be attributed to structural ordering and the effective band-gap narrowing through the combination of silver doping and the plasmonic effect caused by the formation of Ag clusters. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Synthesis and Properties of Metal Oxide Thin Films)
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13 pages, 2396 KiB  
Article
P-Type ZnO Films Made by Atomic Layer Deposition and Ion Implantation
by Guoxiu Zhang, Lars Rebohle, Fabian Ganss, Wojciech Dawidowski, Elzbieta Guziewicz, Jung-Hyuk Koh, Manfred Helm, Shengqiang Zhou, Yufei Liu and Slawomir Prucnal
Nanomaterials 2024, 14(13), 1069; https://doi.org/10.3390/nano14131069 - 22 Jun 2024
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Abstract
Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a wide bandgap semiconductor that holds significant potential for various applications. However, most of the native point defects in ZnO like Zn interstitials typically cause an n-type conductivity. Consequently, achieving p-type doping in ZnO is challenging but crucial for [...] Read more.
Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a wide bandgap semiconductor that holds significant potential for various applications. However, most of the native point defects in ZnO like Zn interstitials typically cause an n-type conductivity. Consequently, achieving p-type doping in ZnO is challenging but crucial for comprehensive applications in the field of optoelectronics. In this work, we investigated the electrical and optical properties of ex situ doped p-type ZnO films. The p-type conductivity has been realized by ion implantation of group V elements followed by rapid thermal annealing (RTA) for 60 s or flash lamp annealing (FLA) on the millisecond time scale in nitrogen or oxygen ambience. The phosphorus (P)-doped ZnO films exhibit stable p-type doping with a hole concentration in the range of 1014 to 1018 cm−3, while antimony (Sb) implantation produces only n-type layers independently of the annealing procedure. Microstructural studies of Sb-doped ZnO show the formation of metallic clusters after ms range annealing and SbZn-oxides after RTA. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Synthesis and Properties of Metal Oxide Thin Films)
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