Molybdenum substitutional doping and its effects on phase transition properties in single crystalline vanadium dioxide thin film

Molybdenum (Mo) doped vanadium dioxide thin films were synthesized using a Mo striped vanadium (V) target during pulsed laser ablation process. The film structure was characterized by high resolution x-ray diffraction, x-ray rocking curve and Rutherford backscattering/channeling measurements. The results show that the full width at half magnitude of the x-ray rocking curve is as narrow as 0.0074°, comparable to that of the (0001) sapphire substrate, 0.0042°, in this study. The ratio of the aligned-to-random backscattered yield reaches 5%, implying that the growth is that of the single crystalline epitaxy. The result of angular scans for both V and Mo atomic channelings reveals that Mo atoms successfully take sites of the V sublattice as a substitutional dopant. It has been noted that the degradation of the phase transition properties of the film upon doping is closely related to the conductivity in the semiconductor phase.