High electron mobility of epitaxial ZnO thin films on c-plane sapphire grown by multistep pulsed-laser deposition

A multistep pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) process is presented for epitaxial, nominally undoped ZnO thin films of total thickness of 1 to 2 mum on c-plane sapphire substrates. We obtain reproducibly high electron mobilities from 115 up to 155 cm(2)/ Vs at 300 K in a narrow carrier concentration range from 2 to 5 x 10(16) cm(-3). The key issue of the multistep PLD process is the insertion of 30-nm-thin ZnO relaxation layers deposited at reduced substrate temperature. The high-mobility samples show atomically flat surface structure with grain size of about 0.5-1 mum, whereas the surfaces of low-mobility films consist of clearly resolved hexagonally faceted columnar grains of only 200-nm size, as shown by atomic force microscopy. Structurally optimized PLD ZnO thin films show narrow high-resolution x-ray diffraction peak widths of the ZnO(0002) omega- and 2Theta-scans as low as 151 and 43 arcsec, respectively, and narrow photoluminescence linewidths of donor-bound excitons of 1.7 meV at 2 K. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.