Annealing temperature effect on the properties of untreated and treated copper films with oxygen plasma

In this work, the copper films were deposited on quartz substrates by DC magnetron sputtering method and then, the prepared films were annealed in air atmosphere at different annealing temperatures. Before annealing, some of the copper films, treated by oxygen plasma, for comparison of the results. The structural andmorphological properties of the films have been investigated using X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy, and four point probe techniques. XRDresults exhibited that the cuprous oxide phase changes to cupric oxide by enhancing of annealing temperatures. Also, oxygen plasma treatment can cause the better crystallinity for the prepared copper oxide films. The results confirm that oxygen plasma treatment, affected the crystal size, grain size, average roughness, sheet resistivity and strain of the films.The optical characteristics of the oxygen plasma treated films, such as refractive index, extinction coefficient and absorption coefficient were calculated by straight forward method proposed by Swanepoel using transmittance measurements. Moreover it was found that annealing temperature augmentation lead to decrease the optical band gap energy calculated using Tauc’s relation from 2.45 to 1.80 eV.