High quality epitaxial ZnO films grown on solid-phase crystallized buffer layers

Abstract High quality epitaxial ZnO films on sapphire (110) plane have been fabricated on ZnO homo-buffer layers crystallized via solid-phase epitaxially (SPE). The SPE-ZnO films are fabricated by annealing of amorphous ZnON (a-ZnON) films deposited by RF magnetron sputtering. During annealing, the a-ZnON films are oxidized and converted to ZnO crystal. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis shows that the resultant films are epitaxially grown on the sapphire substrates. By using the SPE-ZnO films as homo-buffer layers, the ZnO films with high crystallinity, which are deposited by RF magnetron sputtering, are fabricated. The full width at half-maximum of XRD patterns for 2θ-ω and ω scan of (002) plane are 0.094° and 0.12°, respectively, being significantly small compared with 0.24° and 0.55° for the films without buffer layers. Thus utilizing SPE buffer layers is very promising to obtain epitaxial ZnO films with high crystallinity.