Pulsed-electron-beam deposition of transparent conducting SnO2 films and study of their properties

Transparent conducting films of SnO2 are grown on single-crystal R-Al2O3 substrates by the pulsed electron beam deposition (PED) technique, and their electrical, optical, and microstructural properties are compared with the films grown by pulsed-laser deposition (PLD). In PED, the pulsed electron beam used for ablation is generated by a channel-spark system with discharge voltage of 12 kV, current ∼1 kA, and pulse duration of ∼100 ns. The PED films are highly oriented, show good epitaxy, and are highly transparent with transmittance of ∼80% in the visible and IR range. The measured band gap is close to 3.9 eV. It is shown that the PED film properties compare well with those of PLD films, with the 119Sn Mossbauer spectroscopy showing comparable local environments in the two.