Abstract
We have succeeded in fabricating a thin film consisting of semiconducing TiN nanoparticles soft-landed on a substrate at room temperature using N2 reactive magnetron sputtering combined with a gas aggregation method. The total film thickness is about 1200 nm. Under the optimized experimental parameters for controlling the growth of TiN particles, the average diameter of TiN nanoparticles is 2.54 nm and their diameter distribution is from 1.1 to 3.8 nm. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) study reveals that the fabricated semiconducting TiN has N vacancies and/or defects as TixN1-x. The average lattice constant of the TiN particulates is estimated as 4.216 Å and contracted by 0.6% from that of bulk TiN, which is presumably caused by the vacancies and/or defects. Spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) study revealed that the imaginary part of the dielectric constant of the present film shows typical semiconducting behavior and gives the optical band gap of the film as 3.65 eV in direct allowed optical transition mode.