The effects of thermal annealing on properties of MgxZn1-xO films by sputtering

We reported the effects of thermal annealing on the Mg-doped ZnO (MgxZn1-xO) films, which were prepared in the Ar-O-2 mixture ambience by magnetron sputtering. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns showed that the crystal quality of films was enhanced by the post-annealing. and the lattice constants changed to some extent. Meanwhile, the UV-vis absorption spectra indicated that the band gap of the films increased as the increasing annealing temperature, which was resulted by the increasing Mg content by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). Moreover, it could be seen that the photoluminescence (PL) spectrum was different from that of as-grown MgxZn1-xO films: the intensity of UV emission was enhanced but there was no shift with increasing Mg contents in MgxZn1-xO films. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.