Study the effect of rapid thermal annealing on thin films prepared by pulse laser deposition method

Abstract EN

In this paper, the synthesis of nanocrystalline Nickel oxide (NiO) thin films on quartz substrates using a pulsed 532 nm Q-Switched Nd: YAG laser is presented, the annealing temperature was varied from (200 - 400 C).

The X-ray diffraction (XRD) results show that the deposited films are crystalline in nature.

Furthermore, a higher annealing temperature resulted in a thicker NiO film, which was attributed to an increased grain size.

The morphology of deposited films were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and atomic force microscope (AFM);with increasing annealing temperature, the grain size increase .The grain size value (10,23 and 40 nm) for thin films annealing at 200 ,300 and 400 C respectively., and with increasing annealing temperature, surface roughness decrease.

RMS roughness values were (13.5, 7.8 and 5.5 nm) for thin films annealing at 200, 300 and 400 C respectively.

UV–Vis spectrophotometric measurement showed high transparency (nearly 92 % in the wavelength range 400–900 nm) of the NiO thin film with a direct allowed band gap value lying in the range 3.51–3.6 eV.