Morphological and structural features of the CdxPb1−xS films obtained by CBD from ethylenediamine-citrate bath

Abstract

The calculating of ionic equilibria in the system «Pb(CH3COO)2 - CdCl2 - Na3C6H5O7 - ‎(NH3)2(CH2)2 - N2H4CS» allowed us to find conditions and concentration regions of PbS and CdS co-deposition. The determined conditions provided the CBD obtaining of CdxPb1−xS (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.033) substitutional solid solutions films with a cubic structure B1 (space group Fm ) with the grains preferred orientation (200). We established the evolution of the surface morphology of the synthesized films from cubic crystallites to hierarchical structure of globular aggregates by scanning electron microscopy. A quantitative analysis of diffraction patterns showed a decrease of microstrains in CdxPb1−xS films by a about factor of 3 with an increase of the cadmium chloride concentration in the reaction mixture from 0.005 to 0.14 mol/l. The excess of the cadmium content, established by EDX analysis, in the studied films as compared to its content in the solid solution is associated with the additional formation of the amorphous CdS phase up to 72 mol %. A Corrigendum is available for this article at https://doi.org/10.15826/chimtech.2021.8.2.12.

Keywords

• ethylenediamine-citrate bath
• boundary conditions
• chemical bath deposition
• thin films
• cdxpb1−xs solid solutions