Generally increase of thickness leads to decrease of electrical resistivity but sometimes it starts to increase. What would be possible mechanism behind this?
I presume your Al doped ZnO films fall under the category of Transparent conductors
Normally one measures sheet resistance, and then with the film thickness knowledge you can determine the resistivity.
Now The property Resistivity or
alternately the conductivity depends on (carrier concentration and mobility).
Both carrier concentration and mobility must be determined by Hall effect measurements. Looks like these are changing with film thickness.
Now this depends on your growth technique (depositions conditions, substrate temperature, post deposition annealing), which are a varying nature in your films with growing thickness, and can include microstructural differences, and defect state and defect density in the deposited films.
K. Sreenivas
I agree with Robert. We need you to give us more information regarding the growth process and conditions.
Also try to answer the following questions;
Was this a continuous growth process under the same conditions?
What thickness are we talking about here?
How many samples did you grow and was this a general trend in all your samples or it was an isolated incident under certain growth conditions?
Thank you very much for answers, this films were grown in sputtering condition. films shows minimum resistivity at thickness of 260 nm further increase in thickness leads to increase in electrical resistivity.
- What substrate material?
- What substrate temperature?
- Any annealing done?
- Any micrographs to share?
- Have you yet considered using XRD rocking curve analyses to characterize the crystallographic lattice strain state and Nano structure of your film and substrate in situ? Bragg XRD Microscopy!
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