We report on the zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films obtained by the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method using diethyl zinc and water precursors, which allowed us to lower deposition temperature to below $200°\text{C}$ . The so-obtained “as grown” ZnO layers are polycrystalline and show excitonic photoluminescence (PL) at room temperature, even if the deposition temperature was lowered down to $100°\text{C}$ . Defect-related PL bands are of low intensity and are absent for layers grown at $140-200°\text{C}$ . This is evidence that extremely low temperature growth by ALD can result in high quality ZnO thin films with inefficient nonradiative decay channels and with thermodynamically blocked self-compensation processes.

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are a tool used to solve high-complexity computational problems. Apart from modelling the phenomena occurring in Nature, they help in optimization, simulation, modelling, design and prediction purposes in science, medicine, technology, and everyday life. They can be adapted to the given task, be joined with other ones (this leads to combined or hybrid methods), and can work in parallel on many processors. The uses of GAs reported in literature represent a wide variety of approaches and led to solving of numerous computational problems of high complexity. In materials science and related fields of science and technology the GAs open possibilities for materials design, studies of their properties, or production at industrial scale. Here, the recent use of GAs in various domains connected to materials science, solid state physics and chemistry, crystallography, biology, and engineering is reviewed. The listed examples taken from recent literature show how broad the use of these methods is. Emphasis on description of particular results is put in order to direct the reader's attention to valuable new applications as well as interesting or promising ways of solving specific tasks. Trends in method development and application-field extensions as well as some possible future implications are briefly discussed.

We report on zinc oxide thin films grown by atomic layer deposition at a low temperature, which is compatible with a low thermal budget required for some novel electronic devices. By selecting appropriate precursors and process parameters, we were able to obtain films with controllable electrical parameters, from heavily $n$ -type to the resistive ones. Optimization of the growth process together with the low temperature deposition led to ZnO thin films, in which no defect-related photoluminescence bands are observed. Such films show anticorrelation between mobility and free-electron concentration, which indicates that low $n$ electron concentration is a result of lower number of defects rather than the self-compensation effect.