Abstract:
Amorphous transparent conducting oxides (aTCOs) have seen substantial interest in recent years due to the
significant benefits that they can bring to transparent electronic
devices. One such material of promise is amorphous ZnxSn1−xOy
(a-ZTO). a-ZTO possesses many attractive properties for a TCO
such as high transparency in the visible range, tunable charge
carrier concentration, electron mobility, and only being composed
of common and abundant elements. In this work, we employ a
combination of UV−vis spectrophotometry, X-ray photoemission
spectroscopy, and in situ scanning tunneling spectroscopy to
investigate a 0.33 eV blue shift in the optical bandgap of a-ZTO,
which we conclude to be due to quantum confinement effects.
