Structural, Electrical, and Optical Properties of Strontium-Vanadate Films Grown by Magnetron Sputtering

SrVO3 is a strongly correlated metal which has been highly studied in recent years due to its optical and electrical properties, which makes it a promising transparent conducting oxide (TCO). By investigating and optimizing these interesting properties, SrVO3 might be able to replace in the future indium-tin oxide, which is the most commonly used TCO at the current time but suffers from resource depletion. In this study, films of about 30 nm were grown by reactive sputtering of Sr2V2O7 target onto Si substrates, both with and without a TiO2 buffer layer, at different temperatures, and using different ratios between H-2 and Ar during the growth. The structural, electrical, and optical properties of these films were analyzed, illustrating the importance of the TiO2 buffer layer as well as the growth parameters in obtaining conductive and transparent thin films. Moreover, the measurements of electrical and optical properties revealed that actually, these films do not have a correlated metal behavior but are more a semiconductor one, most probably due to a no-stoichiometry in comparison to SrVO3. However, the high electrical conductivity of the obtained films is higher than one of the undoped transparent semiconductors such as ZnO or SnO2 currently used in the field of microelectronics. These results pave the way of using such a material in devices requiring TCO properties in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible approach.