Influence of the Substrate Material on the Structural Properties of Cadmium Telluride Films

With the use of modernized industrial vacuum installations, a series of test samples of cadmium telluride films was produced by the method of thermal vacuum evaporation on glass substrates without a sublayer of transparent conductive oxide, with a sublayer of conductive oxide, and on molybdenum foil substrates to study the influence of the substrate material on the structural parameters of the test samples. The study of the structure was carried out by the method of X-ray diffractometric analysis, the parameters of the lattice, the sizes of the regions of coherent scattering and the texture coefficient of the film were calculated. Based on the results of research into the structural parameters of samples made on a glass substrate, the presence of a cubic phase of cadmium telluride was established. It is shown that when the temperature of the substrate increases, the texture of the samples increases and the presence of tensile stresses is observed, since the lattice period of the cubic phase is significantly higher than that of the tabular phase. For a sample obtained on a glass substrate with a layer of transparent conductive ITO oxide at a substrate temperature of 200 ºC, the presence of two hexagonal phases H1 and H2 and a cubic phase C was established. The samples obtained on a molybdenum foil substrate contain almost entirely the cubic CdTe phase only in very thin sample no. 1 traces of the hexagonal phase are present. For the first thinnest sample, only one main diffraction peak of the cubic phase is observed, which can be explained by the fact that in the initial stages of the film growth, it grows as a highly textured cubic phase with the possible presence of some hexagonal phase. From the analysis of the obtained results, it can be noted that the samples obtained on the molybdenum substrate have a lattice parameter closest to the table data – 6.482-6.483 Å. The structural differences observed between the studied samples are due to the fact that they have a different preferred orientation, which is most likely due to a change in the sputtering speed.