Seed layer assisted hydrothermal deposition of low-resistivity ZnO thin films

In this work, we describe the combination of hydrothermal and atomic layer deposition (ALD) for growing low-resistivity ZnO polycrystalline continuous films. The effect of the thickness of ALD seed layers on the morphology of the hydrothermal ZnO films was studied. It was shown that ZnO films hydrothermally deposited on very thin seed layer consist of separate nanorods but in the case of 20 nm seed layer ZnO films transform to uniform continuous layers comprising of closely packed vertically aligned crystallites. Photoluminescence spectra were shown to exhibit broad band behavior in the visible range, corresponding to radiative recombination processes via oxygen defects of ZnO crystalline lattice, and narrow band in the UV region, associated with band-to-band recombination processes. It was shown that the resistivity of the obtained ZnO films is decreased gradually with the increase of ZnO films thickness and determined by the presence of crystal lattice defects in the seed layer.