Influence of the oxygen flow rate on the plasma parameters in reactive magnetron sputtering plasma using Zn target

Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) and zinc oxide (ZnO) are promising materials which have been investigated for photovoltaic and photosensor applications. The applications of ZnO based thin films are due to several unique material properties where it is a II-IV semiconductor with a wide direct bandgap of 3.2 eV at room temperature, which is almost similar to titanium dioxide (TiO₂) material. In many researches, ZnO based thin films have been grown by various deposition technique, such as sputtering, chemical bath deposition, pulsed laser deposition, and thermal chemical vapor deposition. In such options, the reactive sputtering technique using Zn metal target represents one of the simplest and most effective techniques which have been proposed by many researchers[1,2].