Comparative study of MBE- and ALD-deposited doped zinc oxide

Recently, materials with vanishing refractive index, near-zero-index (NZI), have garnered considerable amount of attention, primarily for their ability to exhibit enhanced light matter interaction, due to slow light affects. Furthermore, effects such as static light, enhanced nonlinearities and emission tailoring have made such materials a heavily researched area. Amongst them, transparent conducting oxides (TCOs), a class of materials that have vanishing index at technologically relevant near-IR spectral range, are increasingly being investigated, for their potential use in photonic circuits. Wide natural abundance of ZnO together with well-studied properties make ZnO-based TCOs, such as aluminum- and gallium-doped ZnO particularly attractive for NZI applications.