Tailoring the optical properties of tin oxide thin films via gamma irradiation

In the current work, the optical properties of tin oxide thin films have been tailored via gamma irradiation for energy applications. The effect of Gamma radiation (50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 kGy) on the microstructural, absorption and oscillator parameters of SnO2 thin films has been investigated. XRD results reveal that the SnO2 films have the symmetry of the space group P42/mnm belonging to the tetragonal system. The crystallite size of γ-irradiated SnO2 thin film slightly increases as the irradiation dose increases. The allowed optical band gaps are estimated by applying various methods such as Tauc’s method, derivation of absorption spectrum fitting and absorption spectrum fitting approaches. The dispersion parameters are extracted from the dispersion curve of the real part of the refractive index. The single-effective-oscillator and Drude models for free charge carrier absorption are applied to obtain the dispersion parameters before and after γ-irradiation.