Variation in the Bandgap of Amorphous Zinc Tin Oxide: Investigating the Thickness Dependence via In Situ STS

Amorphous transparent conducting oxides (a-TCOs) have seen substantial interest in recent years due to the significant benefits that they can bring to transparent electronic devices. One such material of promise is amorphous Zn x Sn1–x O y (a-ZTO). a-ZTO possesses many attractive properties for a TCO such as high transparency in the visible range, tunable charge carrier concentration, electron mobility, and only being composed of common and abundant elements. In this work, we employ a combination of UV–vis spectrophotometry, X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, and in situ scanning tunneling spectroscopy to investigate a 0.33 eV blue shift in the optical bandgap of a-ZTO, which we conclude to be due to quantum confinement effects.