Thermal stability of CdZnO thin films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy

CdZnO thin films with near-band-edge (NBE) photoluminescence (PL) emission from 2.39 eV to 2.74 eV were grown by plasma-assisted molecular-beam epitaxy on c-plane sapphire substrates with 800 °C in situ annealing. CdZnO thin films evolve from pure wurtzite (wz) structure, to mixture of wz and rock-salt (rs) structures confirmed by X-ray diffraction studies. Rapid-thermo-annealing (RTA) was performed on in situ annealed CdZnO samples. Pure wz CdZnO shows insignificant NBE PL peak shift after RTA, while mixture structure CdZnO shows evident blue shifts due to phase change after annealing, indicating the rs phase CdZnO changes to wz phase CdZnO during RTA process.