Structural, electronic and optical properties of Cu-doped ZnO: experimental and theoretical investigation

Abstract

Experiments are supplemented with ab initio density functional theory (DFT) calculations in order to investigate how the structural, electronic and optical properties of zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films are modified upon Cu doping. Changes in characteristic properties of doped thin films, that are deposited on a glass substrate by sol–gel dip coating technique, are monitored using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and UV measurements. Our ab initio calculations show that the electronic structure of ZnO can be well described by DFT+U/ method and we find that Cu atom substitutional doping in ZnO is the most favourable case. Our XRD measurements reveal that the crystallite size of the films decrease with increasing Cu doping. Moreover, we determine the optical constants such as refractive index, extinction coefficient, optical dielectric function and optical energy band gap values of the films by means of UV–Vis transmittance spectra. The optical band gap of ZnO the thin film linearly decreases from 3.25 to 3.20 eV at 5% doping. In addition, our calculations reveal that the electronic defect states that stem from Cu atoms are not optically active and the optical band gap is determined by the ZnO band edges. Experimentally observed structural and optical results are in good agreement with our theoretical results.

Keywords:

• Thin films
• ZnO
• experimental
• optical properties
• ab initio

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Theoretical part of this work was supported by the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO-Vl) and the Methusalem foundation of the Flemish government. Computational resources were provided by TUBITAK ULAKBIM, High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TR-Grid e-Infrastructure), and HPC infrastructure of the University of Antwerp (CalcUA) a division of the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC), which is funded by the Hercules foundation. Experimental part of this work was supported by Ankara University BAP under Project Number [14B0443001].