Physica B: Condensed Matter 560 (2019) 204–207

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Physica B: Condensed Matter

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/physb

Fabrication and characterization of Zinc Telluride (ZnTe) thin films grown T

on glass substrates
Khalid Mehmood Ur Rehmana, Xiansong Liua,∗, Muhammad Riazb, Yujie Yangc, Shuangjiu Fenga,
Muhammad Wasim Khana, Ashfaq Ahmadd, Mudssir Shezada, Z. Wazire, Zulfiqar Alif,
Khalid Mujasam Batoog, Syed Farooq Adilh, Mujaeeb Khanh, Emad H. Raslani
a
Engineering Technology Research Center of Magnetic Materials, School of Physics & Materials Science, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, PR China
b
Department of Physics, University of the Punjab, Lahore 54590, Pakistan
c
Computational Physics Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Yibin University, Yibin 644007, PR China
d
Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan
e
Department of Physics, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan
f
Optics Laboratories, P.O. Box 1021, Islamabad 444000, Pakistan
g
King Abdullah Institute for Nanotechnology, King Saud University, P. O. Box. 2455, Riyadh-11451, Saudi Arabia
h
Department of Chemistry, College of Science, King Saud University, P.O. Box 2455, Riyadh, 11451, Saudi Arabia
i
Department of Physics, College of Science, King Saudi University, P.O. Box 2455, Riyadh, 11451, Saudi Arabia

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In this paper we highlight the fabrication of Zinc Telluride (ZT) thin films grown onto glass substrates at 300 °C
ZnTe thin films with varying thickness, in the range of 200 nm–1000 nm, by adopting the simplistic thermal evaporation
Structural properties technique with base pressure of 10−6 m bar. In addition, their structural and optical characterizations are also
Optical measurements studied by exploring the influence of substrate annealing temperature and thickness of the samples. The mor-
Thermal evaporation
phology, crystalline nature and composition analysis of the thin films were done by X–ray diffraction and
Spectrophotometer
scanning electron microscopy. These results revealed that the sample having thickness around 1000 nm show
crystalline nature while the samples having lower thickness demonstrate amorphous structure. The optical
characterizations are described in the form of transmission spectra, refractive index, and absorption coefficient.
The band gap values obtained by probing optical data, show that all the samples have direct band gaps in the
vicinity of 2.25 eV. This suggests possible applications of ZnTe in optoelectronics devices in the visible region of
electromagnetic spectra.

1. Introduction community of researchers [1,2]. Group II-VI semiconductors offer a

A sufficiently small layer of a specific material in the prescribed
range (micrometers ‘μm’ to nanometer ‘nm’) grown on to a particular
substrate is accepted as a thin film. Thin film deposition contains dif-
ferent growth practices employed in device fabrication by the re-
searchers working in the emerging fields of electronics and spintronics
[1,2]. The main motivation of groups working in this area lies in the
size reduction of thin layer and increased performance of the final de-
vice [3]. Traditionally, ferromagnetic and ferroelectric thin films are in
use, for quite a long time now, in computer motherboards in order to
enhance their memory [3]. In addition, fields like oxide based elec-
tronics [4], thin film based batteries and thin films of organic and in-
organic oxides, to name a few, have opened up new horizons for a large
wide range of electronics transport and optical properties making them
competing candidates for silicon and other semiconductor materials in
photovoltaic and future electronics applications [5,6]. Currently,
polycrystalline Cadmium Telluride thin film solar cells are also offering
high efficiency and long term stability [7]. Zinc Telluride “ZnTe” (ZT),
has a direct band gap of 2.26 eV, and is therefore suitable for devices
operating in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum [8–10].
Similarly to other deeply explored II–VI group members (like; CdTe,
CdS, ZnSe, and ZnS), ZT is seen as an attractive material for the fabri-
cation of high refractive-index materials and in several optoelectronic
devices with special attention paying to the visible region of spectra
[11,12]. It is presently well established that ZT films can be prepared by
a variety of physical vapor deposition (PVD) experimental techniques

∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: xiansongliu@ahu.edu.cn (X. Liu).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physb.2019.02.043
Received 22 November 2018; Received in revised form 18 February 2019; Accepted 19 February 2019
Available online 20 February 2019
0921-4526/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
K.M. Ur Rehman, et al. Physica B: Condensed Matter 560 (2019) 204–207

including thermal evaporation [1,9], sputtering [13,14], molecular

beam epitaxy (MBE) [15,16], metal organic vapor phase epitaxy
(MOVPE) [17,18], Electrodeposition [19,20], isothermal close space
sublimation [21,22], atomic layer evaporation [23], electron beam
evaporation [24], and pulsed laser ablation [25,26]. In general, stoi-
chiometry, growth parameters, growth mode and choice of substrate
[27–33], will impose a great influence on the transport, optical and
structural properties of ZT thin films. In this paper we prepared and
characterized ZT samples with different thickness. We also highlight the
effect of film thickness on structural and optical properties.

2. Materials and methods Fig. 1. XRD pattern of ZT samples; (a) ZnTe 1000, (b) ZnTe 600 and (c) ZnTe
200.
2.1. Materials

In thin film discipline an important issue with epitaxy is the sub-

strate selection. A suitable candidate usually opted for this purpose is
quartz. For this study the microscope glass slides, easily available in
open market, are chosen as substrate. Usually, above mentioned glass
slides are not perfectly cleaned, hence, in order to meet the quality
standards the following route was adopted:

(1). Cleaning ultrasonically in acetone (05 min)

(2). Dipping in de mineralized water (03 min)
(3). Cleaning ultrasonically in methanol (05 min)
(4). Dipping in de mineralized water (03 min)
(5). Cleaning in propanol vapors (at 100 °C)

For the evaporation of ZT onto the processed glass substrates

(5 × 5 cm), we used as a source high purity (99.9%) ZT. Thermal
evaporation (resistive heating) was carried out using Edward 700 va-
cuum system. The distance between source and substrate was kept fixed
at about 24 cm. In order to measure the growth temperature (300 °C) a
K-type thermocouple was utilized. An in-situ thickness monitoring
setup based on optical transmission technique installed with the growth
system assisted in obtaining the deposition rate. The samples chosen for
this study have 200 nm, 400 nm, 600 nm and 1000 nm thicknesses. For
the best sample in terms of crystallinity, in our growth conditions, the
evaporation rate was noticed as 0.8–0.9 Å/s. Additionally all above
samples were annealed in air and temperature was kept constant at
450 °C for an hour.
2.2. Methods
In order to investigate the microstructure of the sample, we used an
optical microscope. Furthermore, X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis was
carried out in continuous mode Analytical X'Pert Pro diffractometer
using Cu Kα radiation (λ = 1.5406 Å). A Hitachi S-4800 scanning
electron microscope operated at 20 KV was used for studying the mi-
crostructures of the samples. For optical characterization a UV/VIS/NIR
spectrophotometer (Perkin Elmer lamda-19) was used.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Structure and morphological analysis
Fig. 2. SEM images of ZnTe thin film samples all shown at the same scale; (a)
ZnTe 1000, (b) ZnTe 600 and (c) ZnTe 200.
patterns for respective samples. This suggests that there seem to be a
connection between film thickness and substrate annealing tempera-
ture. The crystalline structure is highly dependent on the thickness of
ZT films all grown at substrate temperature of 300 °C and annealed to
450 °C for an hour. The morphological analysis of all annealed chosen
ZT thin films was done by SEM and results are shown in Fig. 2. The
microstructures contain average grain sizes within the range of
78–98 nm. In short, an increase in the thickness of the ZT samples
showed an increment in the average grain size.
3.2. Optical analysis
The transmission as a function of wavelength for different thickness
ZT samples prepared at 300 °C substrate temperature is depicted in
Fig. 3. The transmittance spectra helped us to calculate absorption
coefficients of the respective ZT samples.
Considering the fundamental absorption limit, the transmission T is
written as [27],
T = A exp (−α t) (1)

In Fig. 1 we demonstrate XRD results for structural analysis of ZT with

thin films (samples) having thickness 1000 nm, 600 nm and 200 nm A=16 n
o n1 (n 2+k 2) [{ (n
o+n)2+k 2 }.{ (n
1+n)2+k 2 }] −1

respectively.
These results show that the ZT samples prepared at substrate tem-
perature of 300 °C and, annealed in air upto 450 °C for an hour, having
thickness of 1000 nm, as shown in Fig. 1 (a), has cubic structure (FCC)
with a prominent peak in < 111 > direction. However, other ZT sam-
ples having thickness approximately 600 nm (Fig. 1 (b)), 400 nm (not
shown) and 200 nm (Fig. 1 (c)), do not show specific signs of crystalline
structure as there are no well-defined dominant peaks seen in the
Here, n and k stand for real and imaginary parts of the refractive index, n and n are
o 1
refractive index of the air and substrate respectively. For k2 ≪ n2; the
major variation of T arises in the exponential term, with A ≈ 1 [34], we
obtained:
T ≈ exp (−α t)
Where α is the absorption coefficient and t stands for the thickness of

205
K.M. Ur Rehman, et al. Physica B: Condensed Matter 560 (2019) 204–207

Fig. 5. Refractive index vs. Wavelength of ZnTe samples with different thick-
Fig. 3. Transmission vs. Wavelength of all chosen ZnTe samples with different ness.
thickness prepared at substrate temperature of 300 °C.

the film.
Fig. 4 ((a) to (d)), show fitting of above equation (1) on to the ex-
perimental data obtained for different thickness ZT samples. The results
clearly support decent fitting in transparent as well as in the middle
absorption region.
In Fig. 5 we highlight the results of refractive index vs. Wavelength
for all analyzed ZT Films. The refractive index show exponential de-
crease with increasing wavelengths, but around wavelength of 1000 nm
the value of refractive index becomes nearly constant. We can use an
empirical formula for the n dependence of wavelength λ as:
b
n=a+
λ2 (2)

where a and b are constants and their values can be obtained from the
fitting analysis of Fig. 4.
The square of the absorption coefficient vs. the incident photon
energy (h f) is shown in Fig. 6 ((a) to (d)), and extrapolating will give the energy
band gap (E ). The Eg of the samples is
g assessed by using the well-known for-
mula given by equation (2) as follows [35],

α≈(hf − Eg )½ (2)
Fig. 6. Energy gaps of ZnTe samples, solid line represent extrapolation; (a)
Fig. 6 ((a) to (d)), clearly shows that direct optical band gap of thin ZnTe 200, (b) ZnTe 400, (c) ZnTe 600, and (d) ZnTe 1000.

Table 1
Summary of different obtained parameters from data of ZnTe Thin films.
Sample Name Fitting parameters Refractive index n Thickness d Energy
used in Equation by Equation (2) at (nm) gap E
(2) fixed λ = 550 nm (eV)

a b

ZnTe 200 2.72 1.46 E5 3.20 303 2.244

ZnTe 400 2.68 1.36 E5 3.13 481 2.262
ZnTe 600 2.73 1.27 E5 3.15 645 2.265
ZnTe 1000 269 1.18 E5 3.08 890 2.248

films of different thickness. The obtained values are in good agreement

with those quoted in the available literature [10]. In Table 1 we present
the comparison among main results i.e., refractive index, film thickness
and energy gaps of all samples. This information is obtained from the
data analysis of Figs. 4–6.
Fig. 4. The fitted data to the experimental curves of ZT samples, solid line
represent fitting; (a) ZnTe 200, (b) ZnTe 400, (c) ZnTe 600, and (d) ZnTe 1000.

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K.M. Ur Rehman, et al.
4. Conclusion
Thin films of Zinc Telluride (ZT) with varying thickness grown onto
glass substrate have been fabricated by resorting to thermal evapora-
tion (resistive heating) method through control of substrate tempera-
ture and evaporation rate. The samples were then heat treated to 450 °C
for an hour. The results obtained through structural analysis revealed
that the thin film having thickness around 1000 nm has crystalline
structure while the samples with lower thickness show polycrystalline
structure. This is possibly due to its two type of growth, firstly an
amorphous in the beginning and secondly its evolvement into crystal-
line structure. The results obtained by analyzing optical data show that
all the films have direct band gap 2.25 eV, pushing this material further
in the queue of optoelectronic materials to be used for applications like
devices, as window layer or as absorber of UV light.
Acknowledgments
The following authors KMUR, X. L acknowledge the financial sup-
port from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant Nos. 51472004 and 51872004 the Education Department of
Anhui Province (No. KJ2013B293). However, MR acknowledges fi-
nancial support from grant 2013–14 by Punjab University Lahore,
Pakistan. Author K.M. Batoo is thankful to the Deanship of Scientific
Research at King Saud University for its funding through the Research
Group Project No. RG-1437-030.
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