Improving the uncommon (110) growing orientation of Al-doped ZnO thin films through sequential pulsed laser deposition

•Sequential PLD (SPLD) of (110) Al-doped ZnO thin films on amorphous substrate•Highly c-axis oriented films with high transparency and low resistivity•Fine tuning of the dopant concentration through SPLD method

High quality Al-doped ZnO (AZO) films with uncommon (110) orientation are obtained on amorphous substrate by using Sequential Pulsed Laser Deposition technique. The dependence of the structural, optical and electrical properties with dopant concentration and oxygen deposition pressure was investigated systematically. We note a transition from the (002) preferential orientation of crystallites to an uncommon (110) orientation due to a combined effect of doping concentration and deposition pressure decreasing. For constant deposition pressure of 5 Pa the film crystallinity is changed from preferential (002) to polycrystalline when increasing dopant concentration. For the maximum dopant concentration that we have investigated (i.e., 4.4% at.) structural properties of AZO films are changed from a polycrystalline phase to a (110) preferential orientation when the deposition pressure decreases. This uncommon growth mode is accompanied by a change of the morphology from a densely packed granular structure to a more rarefied one. Moreover, the band gap widens up to 3.88 eV and the electrical resistivity drops to 5.4 × 10− 2 Ω cm. The structural changes were attributed to two mechanisms: a first one, responsible for the (002) phase suppression as a consequence of aluminum ion bombardment during the doping process and, a second one, in charge with (110) phase growth as the diffusion rates of zinc and oxygen atoms are affected by the dopant incorporation and by the decrease of deposition pressure.