UC San Diego

Zinc oxide is an extensively studied semiconducting material due to its versatile properties applicable to many technologies such as electronics, optoelectronics, sensing and renewable energy. Although zinc oxide films have been created for device fabrication, the methods used to synthesize them are expensive and unrealistic for affordable commercial devices. In addition, zinc oxide is intrinsically n-type making the realization of stable p- type materials a great challenge for light emitting diodes, solar cells and UV lasing. In this thesis zinc oxide films are created using low cost solution methods. To accomplish this, a previously unreported surfactant, tert-butanol, is used. Several controlled experiments vary the concentration of tert-butanol, zinc and oxygen sources to demonstrate the ability of tert-butanol to create low cost films. Further, small amounts of antimony glycolate are added to the reaction solution, to create antimony doped zinc oxide films on sapphire and silicon substrates. Although hall measurements indicate that the films are n- type, a discussion of antimony activation provides a feasible path for the realization of low cost, p-type zinc oxide films