Zinc oxide is a promising multifunctional material. The practical use of nano- and polycrystalline ZnO devices faces a serious problem of instability of electrical and luminescent characteristics, due to the adsorption of oxygen by the surface during aging. In this paper, the aging effect in ZnO films and nanorod arrays was studied. It was found that ZnO samples demonstrate different behavior of the degradation process, which corresponds to at least two different types of adsorbing surface sites for O2, where O2 adsorption is of a different nature. The first type of surface sites is rapidly depassivated after hydrogen passivation and the aging effect takes place due to these centers. The second type of surface sites has a stable structure after hydrogen passivation and corresponds to HO–ZnO sites. The XPS components of these sites include the Zn2p3/2 peak at 1022.2 ± 0.2 eV and Zn2p1/2 peak at 1045.2 ± 0.2 eV, with a part of the XPS O1s peak at 531.5 ± 0.3 eV. The annealing transforms the first type of site into the second one, and the subsequent short-term plasma treatment in hydrogen results in steady passivation, where the degradation of characteristics is practically reduced to zero.
Rutherford backscattering and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) are used to study distri butions of impurities and structure of the GaSb + Si nanocomposites in several regimes of ion implantation and thermal processing. It is demonstrated that the hot implantation and annealing lead to a significant loss of impurity and the shift of the maximum concentration of impurity atoms toward the surface. The TEM data prove the formation of nanocrystals with sizes ranging from 20 to 100 nm, dislocation defects, and residual mechanical stresses. Raman spectroscopy is used to study the structure and phase composition of experimen tal silicon samples containing various nanocrystalline impurities.
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