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The effect of annealing temperature on the structural, optical, and electrical properties of CdS films

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Abstract

Cadmium sulfide (CdS) photocatalyst films were grown on glass by chemical bath deposition (pH 9.4, 70 °C) and then annealed in nitrogen from 423 K to 823 K in steps of 100 K. The XRD crystallite size increases in a sigmoidal manner from 60 nm to 100 nm while the optical band gap energy decreases from 2.42 eV to 2.28 eV. This trend is paralleled by the decreasing Urbach energy, but only up to 623 K, where it increases again. This is the temperature where the Cd effectively surpasses the phase transformation from cubic to hexagonal, and the activation energy for electronic transport drops by a factor of nearly two.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Mersin University, Mersin, 33343, Turkey

    Hulya Metin & Mehmet Bozoklu

  2. Department of Physics, Erciyes University, Kayseri, 38039, Turkey

    Ari Mehmet & Semra Durmus

  3. Laboratory for High Performance Ceramics EMPA—Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing & Research, CH-8600, Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Selma Erat & Artur Braun

  4. Department of Materials, Nonmetallic Inorganic Materials ETH Zurich—Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, CH-8093, Zurich, Switzerland

    Selma Erat

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  1. Hulya Metin
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  2. Ari Mehmet
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Correspondence to Hulya Metin.

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Metin, H., Mehmet, A., Erat, S. et al. The effect of annealing temperature on the structural, optical, and electrical properties of CdS films. Journal of Materials Research 25, 189–196 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1557/JMR.2010.0025

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