Effect of thermal annealing on microstructure and optical properties of silver-carbon nanocomposite thin films

We reported a novel and versatile processing for the synthesis of Ag-carbon nanocomposites using the combination of the sputtering and PECVD techniques. The influence of the thermal annealing on the sur -face morphology, the structure and the optical properties of these films was studied. The effective med-ium model was used to describe the spectrophotometric measurements. Numerical calculations were allowed determining optical constants. The calculated transition gap E-g was found to vary between 1 and 1.5 eV depending on the annealing temperature. These values are lower than those reported for stan-dard Ag-TiO2 and Ag-ZnO nanocomposites, which is promising for advanced optoelectronic devices. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 1st International Conference on Computations in Materials and Applied Engineering - 2021.