An alternative procedure for the determination of the optical band gap and thickness of amorphous carbon nitride thin films

In this work, we propose an alternative procedure to obtain the optical band gap and the thickness of amorphous carbon nitride thin films that requires only the measurement of the absorbance spectrum of the samples. The method is based on an absorbance spectrum fitting (ASF) procedure using the Tauc model, which is widely applied to the study of amorphous semiconductors. With the aim of evaluating the proposed method two sets of carbon nitride samples deposited on glass substrates were analyzed; one prepared by pulsed laser ablation (PLA) and the second by magnetron sputtering. The obtained results using different conventional methods were compared with the results of the ASF method and a good agreement between the values and the tendencies with the experimental conditions used to prepare the films were observed. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.