A study on some physical properties of a Pb-doped GaAs thin film produced by thermionic vacuum arc

A 155 nm Pb-doped GaAs thin film was deposited on a glass substrate by means of the thermionic vacuum arc technique in 30 s using GaAs and Pb pellets as source materials. Tools and techniques such as an optical reflectometer, UV-VIS-NIR spectrophotometer, FESEM, EDX, AFM and optical tensiometer were employed to investigate the physical properties of the produced film. From the optical investigations, the refractive index at the wavelength of 632.8 nm and optical band gap of the film were found to be 4.03 and 1.13 eV respectively. It was observed that Pb doping increased the value of refractive index and decreased the band gap value. A uniform surface morphology with fine grain covering the entire surface was observed through the FESEM and AFM studies while 50–80 nm grain size and 2.22 nm root mean square roughness values were obtained. The EDX analysis confirmed the presence of Ga, As and Pb elements in the film. The wetting experiments revealed that the contact angle value was dependent on the liquid used. The surface free energy calculated with OWRK/Fowkes and Equation of State approaches were about 26 mN/m.