PRISA: a simple software for determining refractive index, extinction co-efficient, dispersion energy, band gap, and thickness of semiconductor and dielectric thin films

TL;DR

PRISA is a user-friendly Python software that accurately determines optical constants, dispersion parameters, band gap, and thickness of thin films from transmission spectra, simplifying analysis for researchers.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, free software with a graphical interface that automates the extraction of multiple optical and structural parameters from transmission data.

Findings

Software verified with simulated and experimental spectra.

PRISA outperforms existing free software in simplicity and accuracy.

Provides reliable parameter retrieval with a feature to validate results.

Abstract

A simple user-friendly software named PRISA has been developed to determine optical constants (refractive index and extinction co-efficient), dispersion parameters (oscillator energy and dispersion energy), absorption co-efficient, band gap and thickness of semiconductor and dielectric thin films from their measured transmission spectrum, only. The thickness, refractive index, and extinction co-efficient of the films have been derived using Envelope method proposed by Swanepoel. The absorption co-efficient in the strong absorption region is calculated using the method proposed by Connel and Lewis. Subsequently, both direct and indirect bandgap of the films is estimated from the absorption co-efficient spectrum using Tauc plot. The codes for the software are written in Python and the graphical user interface is programmed with tkinter package of Python. It provides convenient input and output of the measured and derived data. The software has a feature to retrieve transmission spectrum using the derived parameters in order to check their reliability. The performance of the software is verified by analyzing numerically generated transmission spectra of a-Si:H amorphous semiconductor thin films, and experimentally measured transmission spectra of electron beam evaporated HfO2 dielectric thin films as examples. PRISA is found to be much simpler and accurate as compared to the other freely available softwares. To help other researchers working on thin films, the software is made freely available at https://www.shuvendujena.tk/download.