| Transparent conductors have important energy and general technology applications as transparent front contacts to photovoltaic cells, electrochromic windows and flat panel displays. Conventional transparent conductors such as SnO 2 are n-type (electron) conductors. As yet, there are no comparable, p-type (hole) analogues. However, researchers have recently reported that CuAlO2, N:ZnO and SrCu2O2 films (among others) may be viable p-type transparent conductors, albeit with carrier concentrations three orders of magnitude lower than n-type SnO2. If these materials could be more effectively hole-doped, they would enhance existing technologies and enable new photovoltaic designs through improved transparent contacts to p-type materials and as possible heterojunction partners. This thesis describes our program for growing and evaluating CuAlO2, ZnO and SrCu 2O2 thin films for use as p-type transparent conductors.; Our work on CuAlO2 focused on the optimization of crystal growth and transport properties by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and sputtering. The films with the best surface morphology and phase-purity were formed by annealing precursors that had been sputtered at room temperature at 940°C in 10T of O2. The phase-purity and transparency of these films is higher than any reported in the literature, and we provided the first experimental confirmation of Kawazoe's work on CuAlO2 [1] as a potential p-type conductor.; We also attempted to make transparent electrically conductive p-type ZnO by PLD and sputtering using N2, N2O, NO, and NH 3 gases. Expanding on the work of Kawai and coworkers [2,3], we used an ion source, rather than an ECR source in the PLD chamber to dissociate N2O gas, and explored the use of aluminum in addition to gallium as potential co-dopants. The most promising results have been obtained with DC reactive sputtering of un-doped zinc metal targets in NO or NH3. A three to six order of magnitude reduction in n-type conductivity occurred when 2% of the argon sputtering gas was replaced with NO. Nitrogen incorporation in some samples was confirmed by direct measurement in concentrations up to 1020 cm−3, but no transition to p-type conductivity was observed. |
