Morphology and Optical Properties of Thin Cd₃As₂ Films of a Dirac Semimetal Compound

Abstract

Using atomic-force microscopy (AFM) and wide-band (0.02–8.5 eV) spectroscopic ellipsometry techniques, we investigated the morphology and optical properties of Cd3As2 films grown by non-reactive RF magnetron sputtering on two types of oriented crystalline substrates (100)p-Si and (001) α-Al2O3. The AFM study revealed the grainy morphology of the films due to island incorporation during the film growth. The complex dielectric function spectra of the annealed Cd3As2/Al2O3 films manifest pronounced interband optical transitions at 1.2 and 3.0 eV, in excellent agreement with the theoretical calculations for the body centered tetragonal Cd3As2 crystal structure. We discovered that due to electronic excitations to the Cd(s) conical bands, the low-energy absorption edge of the annealed Cd3As2 films reveals a linear dependence. We found that for the annealed Cd3As2 films, the Cd(s) conical node may be shifted in energy by about 0.08–0.18 eV above the heavy-flat As(p) valence band, determining the optical gap value. The as-grown Cd3As2 films exhibit the pronounced changes of the electronic band structure due to the doping effect associated with Cd non-stoichiometry, where fine-tuning of the Cd concentration may result in the gapless electronic band structure of Dirac semimetals.

Keywords

• Dirac semimetals
• cadmium arsenide
• thin films
• atomic force microscopy
• spectroscopic ellipsometry