Electronic structure of the amorphous oxide semiconductor a‐InGaZnO4–x: Tauc–Lorentz optical model and origins of subgap states

Abstract This paper discusses an optical model and subgap electronic states for a representative amorphous oxide semiconductor, InGaZnO 4 (a‐IGZO). Parameterized optical models were developed based on the Tauc–Lorentz model combined with a Lorentz‐type oscillator. The measured optical absorption spectra exhibit nearly linear dependences on photon energy ( E ) between 3 eV < E < 5 eV, which requires the transition energies in the Tauc–Lorentz model ( E 0,TL ) being around 4 eV. The optimized parameters for the fixed E 0,TL of 3.7 eV are provided for four different a‐IGZO films with root‐mean‐square errors less than 1%. Formation energies of crystalline IGZO, stoichiometric a‐IGZO, oxygen deficient a‐IGZO and their constituent oxides were calculated by the density functional theory using the local density approximation (LDA) and generalized gradient approximation with PBE96 functionals (PBE). PBE gives larger unit cell volumes at the ground states and better agreement in the formation energies than LDA does. The formation energies of an oxygen deficiency in a‐IGZO were calculated to be 3.2–3.5 eV. The calculated electronic structures of stoichiometric a‐IGZO models exhibit somewhat large dispersions for conduction bands (CB), which are not largely affected by the disordered structure in a‐IGZO, while the dispersions of the valence bands (VBs) are very small, unlike the crystalline IGZO, showing that a‐IGZO have strongly localized states at the VB maximums (VBMs). Oxygen‐deficient a‐IGZO models showed that oxygen deficiencies form both a deep localized state at 0.4–1 eV above VBM and a shallow donor state depending on local atomic configurations. An oxygen deficiency that forms a deep state breaks the dispersion of the CB, which could be an origin of the subgap states observed near CB. (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)