Structural enhancement of ZnO thin films by sol-gel process for photonic applications

摘要

Zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film is grown on glass substrate by the sol-gel spin coating technique. The prepared film annealed at 450 °C. X-ray diffraction shows that the ZnO Film is polycrystalline with (002) preferential orientation. We have found the Surface roughness was minimum (12.4 nm) by atomic force microscopy. The optical band gap is found to be 3.12±0.01 eV by UV-visible Spectroscopy. The Wave guiding properties of the thin film has been also studied. The results indicate that our film is monomode at 632.8 nm with propagation optical loss estimated around 1.6 dB/cm.