2025/06/03 by Kate M. Wislang, Rodrigo M. Gazoni, Roger J. Reeves +1 · 1 voice
Energy · Materials Science · #Advanced Photocatalysis Techniques #Ga2O3 and related materials #ZnO doping and properties
paper · doi:10.1116/6.0004540
openalex publication_date 2025/06/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Ga2O3 is an ultrawide bandgap semiconductor with a very high thermal stability and breakdown strength that is attracting significant interest for use in high-efficiency power electronics and solar-blind UV photodetectors. However, Ga2O3 films are usually expensive to produce by physical vapor deposition due to the creation of volatile suboxides that can significantly limit the achievable growth rates. In this work, a low cost, solution-based sol-gel technique was used to rapidly produce Ga2O3 films. High quality (100% transparent, 0.3 nm root-mean-squared roughness) Sn-doped Ga2O3 films of up to 500 nm thickness were grown by sol-gel on c-plane sapphire substrates. The resulting films were amorphous and exhibited sufficient electrical conductivity for the fabrication of PtOx/Pt Schottky diodes with four orders of magnitude rectification (at ±10 V). Post-growth annealing of the films in N2 at temperatures higher than 600 °C introduced polycrystalline β-Ga2O3 phases but did not produce any improvement in electrical conductivity. This work demonstrates the ability of the highly scalable sol-gel technique to rapidly produce low-cost Sn-doped Ga2O3 films and the first Schottky diode devices fabricated on intentionally doped sol-gel Ga2O3 thin films.