Litty, Irimpan; Ambika, D; Kumar, V; Nampoori, V P N; Radhakrishnan, P(American Institute of Physics, 2008)
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Abstract:
The annealing effect on the spectral and nonlinear optical NLO characteristics of ZnO thin films
deposited on quartz substrates by sol-gel process is investigated. As the annealing temperature
increases from 300–1050 °C, there is a decrease in the band gap, which indicates the changes of the
interface of ZnO. ZnO is reported to show two emission bands, an ultraviolet UV emission band
and another in the green region. The intensity of the UV peak remains the same while the intensity
of the visible peak increases with increase in annealing temperature. The role of oxygen in ZnO thin
films during the annealing process is important to the change in optical properties. The mechanism
of the luminescence suggests that UV luminescence of ZnO thin films is related to the transition
from conduction band edge to valence band, and green luminescence is caused by the transition
from deep donor level to valence band due to oxygen vacancies. The NLO response of these
samples is studied using nanosecond laser pulses at off-resonance wavelengths. The nonlinear
absorption coefficient increases from 2.9 ×10−6 to 1.0 ×10−4 m/W when the annealing temperature
is increased from 300 to 1050 °C, mainly due to the enhancement of interfacial state and exciton
oscillator strength. The third order optical susceptibility x(3) increases with increase in annealing
temperature (T) within the range of our investigations. In the weak confinement regime, T2.4
dependence of x(3) is obtained for ZnO thin films. The role of annealing temperature on the optical
limiting response is also studied.