The Impact of Fe Doping on the Optical and Structural Properties of ZnFeS Fabricated by Electrodeposition Technique

Abstract

Dilute magnetic semiconductors (DMS) are semiconductor materials that are lightly doped with transition metals or rare earth metals. In this work, Fe doped ZnS thin films as a dilute magnetic semiconductor were successfully synthesized for different Fe concentration using electrodeposition technique. The precursor solution contains zinc acetate, thiourea and iron nitrate in the form Zn20-xFexS20, where x=4ml, 6ml and 8ml for different variation of concentration for the dopant. The films were characterized using the X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer, UV-Vis spectrophotometer and X-ray diffraction technique to obtain the elemental composition, optical and structural properties respectively. The elemental composition shows the presence of Fe ion which indicated that ZnS was successfully doped with Fe. The average crystalline size from XRD data was found to be approximately 17nm and it was also observed that the films exhibit a crystalline structure evidenced from their sharp peaks. The band gaps of the materials were determined by drawing TAUC plots from their optical absorption spectra. The values of bandgaps obtained for Zn20-xFexS20 (x=0ml, 4ml, 6ml and 8ml) corresponds to 3.07eV, 2.50eV, 2.80eV and 2.74eV respectively.