Optical and electrical properties of MoO and MoO thin films prepared from the chemically driven isothermal close space vapor transport technique.

Chemically-driven isothermal close space vapour transport was used to prepare pure MoO thin films which were eventually converted to MoO by annealing in air. According to temperature-dependent Raman measurements, the MoO/MoO phase transformation was found to occur in the 225 °C-350 °C range while no other phases were detected during the transition. A clear change in composition as well as noticeable modifications of the band gap and the absorption coefficient confirmed the conversion from MoO to MoO. An extensive characterization of these two pure phases was carried out. In particular, a procedure was developed to determine the dispersion relation of the refractive index of MoO from the shift of the interference fringes of the used SiO/Si substrate. The obtained data of the refractive index was corrected taking into account the porosity of the samples calculated from elastic backscattering spectrometry. The Debye temperature and the residual resistivity were extracted from the electrical resistivity temperature dependence using the Bloch-Grüneisen equation. MoO converted samples presented a very high resistivity and a typical semiconducting behavior. They also showed intense and broad luminescence spectra composed by several contributions whose temperature behavior was examined. Furthermore, surface photovoltage spectra were taken and their relation with the photoluminescence is discussed.