Enhancing the performances of V2O3 thin films as p-type transparent conducting oxides via compressive strain

The traditional strategy for transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) follows the path of chemical design by increasing carrier concentrations in insulators through deliberate doping to coordinate the exclusive properties of electrical conductivity with optical transparency. Despite the success of n-type TCOs, the developed p-type TCOs based on chemical design exhibit much lower performance than the n-type counterparts primarily constrained by the hole doping trouble. Recently, the correlated metal of a V2O3 thin film has been reported as high-performance p-type TCOs with high hole concentration (>1022 cm−3). In this paper, we propose an alternative approach of compressive strain in V2O3 thin films toward further increasing the carrier concentration and, consequently, enhancing the performance of p-type TCOs. The compressive strain of the V2O3 thin film is realized by the lattice mismatch between V2O3 and Al2O3. Interestingly, carrier concentrations in strained V2O3 thin films can be increased by several times exceeding 1023 cm−3, which directly correlates with the increase (decrease) in a1g (egπ) orbital occupation as verified by the Raman spectrum. Meanwhile, the screened plasma energy of a strained V2O3 thin film shifts to ∼1.6 eV, which is less than 1.75 eV to assure the opening of the transparency window in the visible region. As a result, strained V2O3 thin films exhibit enhanced performance as p-type TCOs with relatively high figure of merit. These results indicate that the structural modification can open up an effective approach for increasing the carrier concentration and enhancing the performance of p-type TCOs.