Quantitative Determination of Deuterium Atom Concentration in Zinc Oxide Thin Films by Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry
ZnO is a wide-gap semiconductor with very interesting electronic properties.[1,2] Therefore, it has been extensively studied for many years. It has been found that even low centrations of hydrogen in ZnO film can considerably change its electronic behavior.[3-5] Quite a few papers have discussed this issue but it has not been fully understood. Lack of experimental data, especially quantitative data on hydrogen concentration in ZnO samples is an important reason. Dynamic SIMS is the best technique to determine concentration of hydrogen atoms in materials.[6-9] However, it is a very specific technique and the entation is mostly available in semiconductor industry. ToF-SIMS is a more versatile instrument and it is more available in universities and research institutes. Background hydrogen interference has been known to be a serious problem in quantifying hydrogen atoms in solid samples. Although SIMS is an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) technique, there are still some residual gases existing in vacuum chambers during analysis. Most of them are H2, H2O or CH4, which lead to a background that greatly interferes quantitative detection of hydrogen. Therefore, deuterium atoms have been intentionally introduced into the system to avoid this problem. Standard samples are very important for SIMS quantitative analysis. A common method to prepare such kind of standard samples is ion-implanting. Therefore, a set of standard D-ZnO samples were prepared by ion-implanting in our work. In this paper, we report using ToF-SIMS to quantitatively determine the concentration of deuterium atoms in a number of high-quality epitaxial ZnO films, with a set of standard samples as references. We are especially interested in the detection limit of deuterium concentration in ZnO. In addition, hydrogen background interference was also investigated.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States). Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab. (EMSL)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 969617
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-63151; 19394; KP1704020; TRN: US1000335
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry, 20th International Conference . AIP Conference Proceedings , 1099:343-346
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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