Effect of Substrate Temperature on Structural, Optical and Electrical Properties of Sputtered NiO-Ag Nanocrystalline Thin Films

Abstract

NiO-Ag thin films were deposited on Coming 7059 glass substrates by DC reactive magnetron sputtering technique and investigated the substrate temperature (T-s) dependent properties of NiO-Ag thin films. X-ray diffraction results showed that crystalline films can be obtained at high T-s and all films have a preferred crystal growth texture with face centered cubic (f(cc)) structure and was also confirmed by Raman studies. The grain size, transmittance, band gap, mobility and carrier concentrations were increased with T-s. Room temperature deposited films have an average roughness around 6.9 nm where as increment of T-s resulted in increased roughness up to 14 nm with nanocrykalline morphology. The optimum substrate temperature to obtain NiO-Ag films was found to be 200 degrees C. It was found that with increasing the T-s, resistivity of the films was significantly decreased.