Morphology and Optical Properties of Thin Cd3As2 Films of a Dirac Semimetal Compound

TL;DR

This study investigates the morphology and optical properties of Cd3As2 thin films, revealing their grainy structure, optical transitions, and tunable electronic band structure, relevant for Dirac semimetal applications.

Contribution

It provides detailed experimental analysis of Cd3As2 films grown on different substrates, linking morphology and optical properties with electronic band structure modifications.

Findings

Pronounced interband optical transitions at 1.2 and 3.0 eV.

Linear low-energy absorption edge due to electronic excitations.

Doping effects can tune the electronic band structure to be gapless.

Abstract

Using atomic-force microscopy (AFM) and wide-band (0.02-8.5 eV) spectroscopic ellipsometry techniques we investigated morphology and optical properties of Cd3As2 films grown by non-reactive rf magnetron sputtering on two types of oriented crystalline substrates (100)p-Si and (001) alpha-Al2O3. The AFM study revealed grainy morphology of the films due to island incorporation during the film growth. The complex dielectric function spectra of the annealed Cd3As2/Al2O3 films manifest pronounced interband optical transitions at 1.2 and 3.0 eV, in excellent agreement with the theoretical calculations for the body centered tetragonal Cd3As2 crystal structure. We discovered that due to electronic excitations to the Cd(s) conical bands the low-energy absorption edge of the annealed Cd3As2 films reveals linear dependence. We found that for the annealed Cd3As2 films the Cd(s) conical node may be shifted in energy by about 0.08-0.18 eV above the heavy-flat As(p) valence band, determining the optical gap value. The as-grown Cd3As2 films exhibit the pronounced changes of the electronic band structure due to doping effect associated with Cd non-stoichiometry, where fine-tuning of Cd concentration may result in the gapless electronic band structure of Dirac semimetals.