Annealing temperature effect on the structural and optical properties of thermally deposited nanocrystalline CdS thin films

Abstract

A nanocrystalline CdS thin film with 100 nm thickness has been prepared by thermal evaporation technique on glass substrate with substrate temperature of about 423 K. The films annealed under vacuum at different annealing temperature 473, 523 and 573 K. The X-ray diffraction studies show that CdS thin films have a hexagonal polycrystalline structure with preferred orientation at (002) direction. Our investigation showed the grain size of thin films increased from 9.1 to 18.9 nm with increasing the annealing temperature. The optical measurements showed that CdS thin films have direct energy band gap, which decreases with increasing the annealing temperature within the range 3.2- 2.85 eV. The absorbance edge is blue shifted. The absorption coefficient for CdS films decreases with increasing the annealing temperature. The optical constant for the films such as refractive index, extinction coefficient, real and imaginary part of dielectric constant were observed to decrease with increasing the annealing temperature. The particle size calculated from absorption spectrum has increased from 4.74 to 8.38 nm with increasing the annealing temperature.