X. Wang et al. / Journal of Alloys and Compounds 556 (2013) 182–187
187
at 800 °C). And it is found the decrease between 200 °C and 400 °C is
larger than that between 400 °C and 900 °C, indicating the densifica-
tion of amorphous ZrO is larger than that of crystallized ZrO films.
Acknowledgement
2
2
We thank Jiandong Wu for the AFM measurement. This
work was financially supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11074189, U1230113), National
Key Technology Research and Development Program of China
(Grant No. 2013BAJ01B01), Shanghai Committee of Science and
Technology, China (Grant Nos. 11nm0501600, 11nm0501300),
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant
No. 2012KJ014) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant
No. 2012M520925).
This is consistent with the refractive index change during annealing.
Additionally, it can be found from Fig. 6b that different anneal-
ing procedure caused a significant change in refractive index vari-
ation of the samples during the annealing. From 200 to 400 °C (by
RTA), the organic groups and absorbed water still exist. The resid-
ual organic segments have a low refractive index and also preserve
the film with a high porosity, hence make the film a low refractive
index. Thermally induced densification of the film only results in a
slight increase of refractive index from 1.575 to 1.594. After an-
nealed at 500 °C, the pores left by the removal of organic segments
decrease the refractive index while crystallization increases it.
Therefore, the refractive index of the film only increases to 1.606.
Upon annealing at higher temperatures, the densification and in-
creased crystallinity of the films give rise to a rapid increase of
the refractive index, from 1.606 to 1.929 between 500 and
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