Indian J. Phys. 84 (10), 1341-1346 (2010) © 2010 IACS Optical and electrical properties of p-type transparent conducting CuAlO 2 thin film synthesized by reactive radio frequency magnetron sputtering technique B Saha, R Thapa, S Jana and K K Chattopadhyay * Thin Film and Nanoscience Laboratory, Department of Physics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700 032, India E-mail : kalyan_chattopadhyay@yahoo.com Abstract : Thin films of p-type transparent conducting CuAlO 2 have been synthesized through reactive radio frequency magnetron sputtering on silicon and glass substrates at substrate temperature 300 0 C. Reactive sputtering of a target fabricated from Cu and Al powder (1:1.5) was performed in Ar+O 2 atmosphere. The deposition parameters were optimized to obtain phase pure, good quality CuAlO 2 thin films. The films were characterized by studying their structural, morphological, optical and electrical properties. Keywords : Sputtering; electrical conductivity; optical properties PACS Nos. : 81.15.Cd; 73.50.-h; 78.66.-w 1. Introduction In recent years, extensive studies have been carried out on transparent conducting oxide semiconductor materials of both p- and n-type. It has been found that there are many oxide materials like ZnO [1-3], CdO [4, 5], SnO 2 [6, 7] etc. which can serve as a good n- type TCO material. Many efforts have been focused on the search for a suitable p-type transparent conducting oxide (TCO) material for thin film applications. Different materials like CuO [8, 9], NiO [10, 11] etc. show p-type conductivity but do not have enough technical advantages either because of low conductivity or for not having sufficiently large band gap to become transparent in the visible region. CuAlO 2 is one of the ideal p-type materials which can be employed to prepare thin films with excellent technical ability. Consequently CuAlO 2 thin films can be used in various applications such as in solar cells [12], light emitting diodes, photo transistors etc. Different deposition techniques *Corresponding Author