The characterization of zinc oxide nanaostructures with different deposition layers using sol gel dip coating method / Mohamad Faris Zaini

Zinc oxide (ZnO) is one of the compound semiconductors in group II-VI within the periodic table. The objective of this experiment is to characterize the ZnO thin films with different deposition layers to study the effects of ZnO thin films which deposited with different number of layers. The scopes of this research is to deposit five samples of ZnO thin films with different deposition layers. The sol gel dip coating technique was used to synthesize high quality ZnO thin films at different deposition layers. All thin films were deposited on quartz substrates. Lastly, the thin films structural, optical and electrical properties were characterized. These ZnO thin films structural properties were investigated using field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) to observe thin films surface morphology and measured their grain sizes. The thin films thickness were measured using surface profiler. The results of FESEM showed that the grain sizes increased and films porosity slightly reduced when the number of deposited layers increase. ZnO thin films optical properties were characterized using photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy to examine luminescence properties. The thin films optical properties also determined using UV-Vis spectrophotometer in order to study the films transmittance, absorbance and optical band gap. There are broad strong red bands (650nm) and overlapped sharp ultraviolet emissions (380nm) are show in the PL spectra. The optical transmittance found decreases and as the number of deposited layers increase, while the optical absorbance increased with the increase of number of layers. The films optical band gap was found slightly smaller compared to ZnO crystal optical band gap which about 3.3eV. It was observed that the films resistivity reduce and conductivity increase with the increase of deposited layers. The electrical properties were investigated using current-voltage (IV) measurement to study