I have successfully deposited SnS thin films using ALD by alternating doses of a tin (ii) metal precursor gas with hydrogen sulphide gas.
For some oxygen to be incorporated into the SnS material, will you suggest inserting ALD cycles that alternate doses of the same tin(ii) metal precursor with doses of water vapor?
How likely is it for oxygen to be incorporated into SnS thin films?
In typical processes/tools the question is usually how to avoid incorporating oxygen in non-oxide films. Are you able to verify the absence of oxygen now, and quantify/estimate what you get when you do a few O2 (or H2O) cycles?
Not knowing what tin precursor you use, but if you use H2S the H will give a clean reaction with organic radicals as H2O will do. So water is the best choice to incorporate Oxygen into SnS films.
Hi Helen,
Unless your XPS is connected in vacuum (or in-situ) to the XPS, quantifying oxygen is fairly challenging. The adventitious carbon on the surface contains non-negligible amounts of oxygen. This contamination is inconsistent between samples and measurement days. Some people try to work around this by sputtering a bit of the surface (e.g. by Ar plasma in the XPS), but this measure can preferentially remove oxygen from inside the film. Bottom line: it's not easy to reliably quantify oxygen in thin films.
You can try to distinguish the different oxidation states of the O1s peak, but its not always straightforward in the absence of good references and when your film is amorphous and somewhat random.
Let us know what you find.
Lior
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