Analysis of optical band-gap shift in impurity doped ZnO thin films by using nonparabolic conduction band parameters

Polycrystalline ZnO thin films both undoped and doped with various types of impurities, which covered the wide carrier concentration range of 10(16)-10(21) cm(-3), were prepared by magnetron sputtering, and their optical-band gaps were investigated. The experimentally measured optical band-gap shifts were analyzed by taking into account the carrier density dependent effective mass determined by the first-order nonparabolicity approximation. It was shown that the measured shifts in optical band-gaps in ZnO films doped with cationic dopants, which mainly perturb the conduction band, could be well represented by theoretical estimation in which the band-gap widening due to the band-filling effect and the band-gap renormalization due to the many-body effect derived for a weakly interacting electron-gas model were combined and the carrier density dependent effective mass was incorporated. (C) 2013 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.