Afm Studies on Surface Morphology, Topography and Texture of Nanostructured Zinc Aluminum Oxide Thin Films

Zinc Aluminum Oxide (ZAO) thin films were deposited on glass substrates by DC reactive magnetron sputtering technique with high purity Zn and Al targets. After the deposition, the films were annealed in vacuum from 200 to 500 C. Surface roughness measurement of ZAO thin films in the nanometer scale can be accurately determined using the atomic force microscopy. Surface roughness and grain size for all the samples shows a direct relation between each other where the surface roughness increases as the grain size increases with increase of annealing temperature. The average roughness, maximum peak to valley height, root mean square (RMS) roughness, ten-point mean height roughness, surface skewness and surface kurtosis parameters are used to analyze the surface morphology of ZAO films.