Effects of Au nanoslabs on the performance of CdO thin films designed for optoelectronic applications

In this work, the effect of 50 nm thick gold nanosheets on the structural, morphological, optical and electrical properties of stacked layers of CdO are investigated. The insertion of Au nanoslabs decreased the lattice parameters of the cubic unit cells of CdO. It also decreased the microstrain, the defect density, the stacking fault percentage and increased the crystallite and grain sizes. Optically, the light absorbability is enhanced, the energy band gap is shrunk and the optical conductivity is increased. The optical conductivity parameters presented by scattering time, plasmon frequency, drift mobility and free carrier density are all engineered via participation of Au nanosheets. On the other hand, electrical measurements in the frequency domain of 0.01-1.80 GHz indicated that the Au nanosheets forced the capacitance spectra to exhibit negative values and increased the electrical conductivity in the studied frequency domain. The terahertz cutoff frequency is tuned in the range of 5.0-22.0 THz indicating the applicability of the CdO/Au/CdO (CAC) films as terahertz filters. The direct current electrical conductivity measurements have shown that while the CC samples exhibit nondegenerate extrinsic nature of conduction, the CAC samples displayed degenerate/nondegenerate transitions at 400 K. With the feature of negative capacitance that can be used for noise reduction and parasitic capacitance cancellation, the CAC films can be regarded as promising structure for multifunctional device applications.