Transparent and conducting boron doped ZnO thin films grown by aerosol assisted chemical vapor deposition

Donglei Zhao; Sanjayan Sathasivam; Mingyue Wang; Claire J Carmalt

doi:10.1039/d2ra05895b

Transparent and conducting boron doped ZnO thin films grown by aerosol assisted chemical vapor deposition

RSC Adv. 2022 Nov 17;12(51):33049-33055. doi: 10.1039/d2ra05895b. eCollection 2022 Nov 15.

Authors

Donglei Zhao¹, Sanjayan Sathasivam^{1

2}, Mingyue Wang¹, Claire J Carmalt¹

Affiliations

¹ Materials Chemistry Centre, Department of Chemistry, University College London 20 Gordon Street London WC1H 0AJ UK.
² School of Engineering, London South Bank University London, SE1 0AA UK c.j.carmalt@ucl.ac.uk +44 20-7679-7463.

Abstract

ZnO based transparent conducting oxides are important as they provide an alternative to the more expensive Sn : In₂O₃ that currently dominates the industry. Here, we investigate B-doped ZnO thin films grown via aerosol assisted chemical vapour deposition. B : ZnO films were produced from zinc acetate and triethylborane using either tetrahydrofuran or methanol (MeOH) as the solvent. The lowest resistivity of 5.1 × 10^-3 Ω cm along with a visible light transmittance of ∼75-80% was achieved when using MeOH as the solvent. XRD analysis only detected the wurtzite phase of ZnO suggesting successful solid solution formation with B³⁺ substituting Zn²⁺ sites in the lattice. Refinement of the XRD patterns showed minimal distortion to the ZnO unit cell upon doping when MeOH was the solvent due to the immiscibility of the [BEt₃] solution (1.0 M solution in hexane) in methanol that limited the amount of B going into the films, thus preventing excessive doping.