The ZrO₂Thin Films Prepared By RF Magnetron Sputtering And The Study Of Properties

ZrO₂thin films have a lot of good performance other metal oxide films of ⅣBfamily doesn’t have. Especially with some of the outstanding optical properties, suchas photon absorption rate very low among a wide spectrum, optical damage thresholdvery high and so on, ZrO₂thin films have been widely used as the filters, thesspectroscopes, antireflection films and reflection increasing films and other opticalcomponents. In addition, because of other good properties, ZrO₂thin films have alsobeen widely used in nanostructured materials, memory material, multilayercomposite material, microelectronics materials and other fields. So the preparation ofhigh quality ZrO₂thin films and study of their properties is very practicallysignificant.In this paper, the ZrO₂thin films were prepared on glass substrates with RFmagnetron sputtering method by the domestically produced OLED multi-coatingsystems through changing sputtering conditions many times such as total workinggas pressure, flow ratio of oxygen and argon and so on. The purity of ZrO₂targetmaterial selected is99.9%. Finally we have deposited excellent preferred orientationof ZrO₂thin film samples under the process conditions of the total gas pressure of1.0Pa, the substrate temperature of150℃and240W sputtering power. Then thedeposited high quality thin film samples were annealed respectively30min at700℃and800℃. The results of XRD analysis of the film surface unannealed and annealedat700℃and800℃scaned by D/Max-rB rotating anode X ray diffraction show thatZrO₂thin film has its preferential growth direction, crystallizing better and crystalgrain bigger after annealing at800℃. The results of ZrO₂film surface unannealed,annealed at700℃and800℃scaned by the Nano Scope III type atomic forcemicroscope show that ZrO₂thin film surface annealed at700℃did not changesignificantly, grain size small.The surface annealed at800℃was relatively moresmooth, the grain size relatively bigger, grain recrystallizing and crystallinity better. U-3900type UV spectrophotometer is used to measure transmission rate of the filmsunannealed and annealed at800℃. From the transmission spectrum transmission rateof ZrO₂thin films was relatively higher among the wavelength from250nm to600nm. In the wavelength of260nm, transmission rate curve appeared peak. Afterannealing, transmission rate increased. Using FEI scanning electron microscope forcomponent analysis, we found the ratio of O element and Zr element is close to2:1from the energy spectrum of samples. Through a series of experiments, we obtainoptimum process of ZrO₂thin films prepared by RF magnetron sputtering, andimprove film transmittance after annealing at800℃.