Preparation and Characterization of Molybdenum Trioxide Thin Films Grown by Two-Step Method: DC Sputtering and Plasma Oxidation

Nanostructured molybdenum trioxide (MoO3) films as environmental friendly materials can be used in various filed such as electrochemical energy storage devices, rechargeable batteries and gas sensors. In this work, nanostructured MoO3 thin films were successfully grown on quartz substrates by two-step method. In the first step, molybdenum films were deposited on quartz substrates by DC magnetron sputtering technique. Then the plasma oxidation of molybdenum films was used to prepare molybdenum oxide. The effect of plasma oxidation power and thermal annealing on the structural, morphological and optical properties of the MoO3 films were investigated by different analysis including XRD, AFM, RBS and spectrophotometry. XRD results indicated that the plasma powers effectively influenced the structure of films. The RBS analysis confirmed the presence of Mo and O elements. The AFM images showed that an increment of plasma power leads to decrease the roughness of films and annealing effectively changed the morphology of films. Furthermore, the optical transmittance decreases by increment of the plasma oxidation powers.