Copper Nitride Nanostructures Prepared by Reactive Plasma Sputtering Technique

Abstract

In this work, copper nitride nanostructures were synthesized by dc reactive magnetron plasma sputtering technique. These nanostructures were grown on silicon substrates in order to fabricate anisotype heterojunctions. The nitrogen content was varied in the gas mixture in order to introduce its effect on the characteristics of the synthesized nanostructures. For nitrogen content of 10%, the synthesized nanostructures were polycrystalline and the minimum particle size was about 18 nm with approximately spherical shape. As the nitrogen content was increased in the gas mixture, the particles got larger and the electrical resistivity reasonably increased to reach its maximum at nitrogen content of 60% before slightly decreased with further increasing of nitrogen content. The synthesized nanostructures show high absorption in the spectral range of 200-500nm while their absorbance was highly decreased at the longer wavelengths. The energy band gap of these nanostructures was determined to be 1.856 eV. These heterojunctions can be successfully employed for optoelectronics and gas sensing applications.