Influence of aluminium doping on thermoelectric performance of atomic layer deposited ZnO thin films

We study the effect of Al doping on thermoelectric power factor of ZnO films grown using atomic layer deposition method. The overall doping level is tuned by either varying the precursor pulsing sequence or by varying the number of precursor pulses while keeping the sequence unchanged. We observe that commonly utilized doping approach when periodic dopant layers are densely packed results in reduced power factor. At the same time, we find that thermoelectric performance can be improved by clustering the dopants. In addition, the clustering was found to tune the preferred crystal orientation of the polycrystalline film. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.