Aluminum-doped tin oxide (SnO ${}_2$ :Al) thin films were produced by an ultrasonic spray pyrolysis method. The effect of aluminum doping on structural, optical, and electrical properties of tin oxide thin films synthesized at 420 ${}^{°}$ C was investigated. Al doping induced a change in the morphology of tin oxide films and yielded films with smaller grain size. SnO ${}_2$ thin films undergo a structural reordering and have a texture transition from (301) to (101), and then to (002) preferred cristallographic orientation upon Al doping. The lattice parameters (a and c) decreases with Al doping, following in a first approximation Vegard’s law. The optical transmission does not change in the visible region with an average transmittance value of 72–81%. Conversely, in the near infrared (NIR) region, the plasmon frequency shifts towards the IR region upon increasing Al concentration in the grown films. Nominally undoped SnO ${}_2$ have a conductivity of ∼1120 S/cm, which is at least two orders of magnitude larger than what is reported in literature. This higher conductivity is attributed to the Cl ${}^{-}$ ions in the SnCl ${}_4$ ·5(H ${}_2$ O) precursor, which would act as donor dopants. The introduction of Al into the SnO ${}_2$ lattice showed a decrease of the electrical conductivity of SnO ${}_2$ due to compensating hole generation. These findings will be useful for further studied tackling the tailoring of the properties of highly demanded fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) films.

The doping of semiconductor materials is a fundamental part of modern technology, but the classical approaches have in many cases reached their limits both in regard to achievable charge carrier density as well as mobility. Modulation doping, a mechanism that exploits the energy band alignment at an interface between two materials to induce free charge carriers in one of them, is shown to circumvent the mobility restriction. Due to an alignment of doping limits by intrinsic defects, however, the carrier density limit cannot be lifted using this approach. Here, a novel doping strategy using defects in a wide bandgap material to dope the surface of a second semiconductor layer of dissimilar nature is presented. It is shown that by depositing an insulator on a semiconductor material, the conductivity of the layer stack can be increased by 7 orders of magnitude, without the necessity of high‐temperature processes or epitaxial growth. This approach has the potential to circumvent limits to both carrier mobility and density, opening up new possibilities in semiconductor device fabrication, particularly for the emerging field of oxide thin film electronics.

ALD of superconducting films for various high performance applications.

Low-temperature-processed ITO thin films offer the potential of overcoming the doping limit by suppressing the equilibrium of compensating oxygen interstitial defects. To elucidate this potential, electrical properties of Sn-doped In ${}_2$ O ${}_3$ (ITO) thin films are studied in dependence on film thickness. In-operando conductivity and Hall effect measurements during annealing of room-temperature-deposited films, together with different film thickness in different environments, allow to discriminate between the effects of crystallization, grain growth, donor activation and oxygen diffusion on carrier concentrations and mobilities. At $200{}^{\circ }\mathrm{C}$ , a control of carrier concentration by oxygen incorporation or extraction is only dominant for very thin films. The electrical properties of thicker films deposited at room temperature are mostly affected by the grain size. The remaining diffusivity of compensating oxygen defects at $200{}^{\circ }\mathrm{C}$ is sufficient to screen the high Fermi level induced by deposition of Al ${}_2$ O ${}_3$ using atomic layer deposition (ALD), which disables the use of defect modulation doping at this temperature. The results indicate that achieving higher carrier concentrations in ITO thin films requires a control of the oxygen pressure during deposition in combination with seed layers to enhance crystallinity or the use of near room temperature ALD.

Next-generation superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities, based on tailored thin films, would allow for more efficient and sustainable accelerators operating at higher accelerating gradients. In particular, superconductor–insulator–superconductor (SIS) multilayers are proposed as a potential alternative to bulk Nb. In this context, NbTiN stands out as a superconducting candidate. Here, we report our studies on NbTiN thin films grown by plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) in a supercycle approach on AlN in situ deposited on planar silicon substrates. In detail, different ternary compound compositions and thicknesses have been investigated concerning the elemental composition, the superconducting properties, and the crystallinity of the deposited thin films. Two different post-deposition thermal treatments have been applied to Nb0.75Ti0.25N thin films of different thicknesses. Their effect on the film properties has been evaluated. It has been demonstrated that an optimized post-deposition thermal annealing procedure significantly improves the quality of our PEALD deposited Nb0.75Ti0.25N thin films, achieving the highest superconducting critical temperature (Tc) of 15.9 K obtained for films deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD) so far and a lower critical field (Hc1) of 213 mT, which overpasses the bulk Nb intrinsic limit of 200 mT. Our studies are a promising first stepping stone on the path toward tailored thin films based SRF cavities.