Understanding nanomechanical and surface ellipsometry of optical F-doped SnO2 thin films by in-line APCVD

Afzaal, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5474-3801, Yates, HM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3261-0183, Al-Ahmed, A, Ul-Hamid, A, Salhi, B and Ali, M 2020, 'Understanding nanomechanical and surface ellipsometry of optical F-doped SnO2 thin films by in-line APCVD' , Applied Physics A: Materials Science and Processing, 126 , p. 840.

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Abstract

In this paper, a production-type chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is utilized to deposit fluorine doped tin oxide thin films of different thicknesses and dopant levels. Deposited films showed a preferred orientation along the (200) plane of a tetragonal structure due to the formation of halogen rich polar molecules during the process. A holistic approach studying elastic modulus and hardness of resulting films by a high-throughput atmospheric-pressure CVD process is described. The hardness values determined lie between 8 - 20 GPa. For a given load, the modulus generally increased slightly with the thickness. The average elastic recovery for the coatings was found to be between 45 – 50 %. Refractive index and thickness values derived from the fitted ellipsometry data were in excellent agreement with independent calculations from transmission and reflection data.

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