Effect of thickness on InSb thin film properties grown onto silicon heated substrates by pulsed laser deposition
240 viewsDOI:
https://doi.org/10.54939/1859-1043.j.mst.84.2022.109-118Keywords:
A3B5; InSb thin film; Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD); Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR); Atomic Force Microscopy; Energy band gap.Abstract
InSb based-material is promising candidate to be widely used in civil and military missions, ranging from magnetism to optics. This report presents InSb thin films with various thicknesses from 150 nm to 2000 nm, developed by pulsed laser deposition approach at 300 °C and later characterised. Atomic structure analyses (XRD) reveal that the thin film are well crystallized at all of thicknesses. Increasing the thin film thickness leads to an increase in the crystallite size (18 nm - 33 nm) and the nanograins are made up from various crystallites, based on the AFM measurement. While the films have root mean square roughness of 3 nm for thin film thickness < 500 nm, this roughness increases to 15 nm for film thickness ≥ 500 nm. SEM analysis depicts that all thin films have a continuous, almost closely compacted grain structure. The reported results on structure, microstructure are correlated to explain the variation in optical properties of fabricated thin films through FTIR measurement.
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