Enhancement of electrical performance of ZnSe thin films via Au nanosandwiching

In this work, we report the effect of sandwiching of Au nanosheets on the structural and electrical properties of ZnSe thin films. The ZnSe films which are grown by the thermal evaporation technique onto glass and yttrium thin film substrates exhibit lattice deformation accompanied with lattice constant extension, grain size reduction and increased defect density upon Au nanosandwiching. The temperature dependent direct current conductivity analysis has shown that the 70 nm thick Au layers successfully increased the electrical conductivity by three orders of magnitude without causing degeneracy. On the other hand, the alternating current conductivity studies in the frequency domain of 10 MHz to 1800 MHz have shown that the alternating current conduction in ZnSe is dominated by both of quantum mechanical tunneling and correlated barrier hopping of electrons over the energy barriers formed at the grain boundaries. The Au nanosheets are observed to increase the density of localized states near Fermi level and reduce the average hopping energy by ~5 times. The conductivity, capacitance, impedance and reflection coefficient spectral analyses have shown that the nanosandwiching of Au between two layers of ZnSe makes the zinc selenide more appropriate for electronic applications and for applications which need microwave cavities.