Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Materials Today: Proceedings 4 (2017) 294–300 www.materialstoday.com/proceedings * Corresponding author. Tel.: +0-851-827-3331; fax: +0-891-279-0399. E-mail address:brhymavathi@gmail.com 2214-7853©2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Conference Committee Members of 5th International Conference of Materials Processing and Characterization (ICMPC 2016). 5th International Conference of Materials Processing and Characterization (ICMPC 2016) Surface Morphology and Opto-electronic Properties of Nanostructured Cr doped CdO Thin Films for Photovoltaics B. Hymavathi a *, B. Rajesh Kumar b ,T. Subba Rao c a Department of Physics, Anil Neerukonda Institute of Technology and Sciences(Autonomous), Visakhapatnam - 531 162, A.P, India b Department of Physics, GITAM Institute of Technology, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam - 530 045, A.P, India c Department of Physics, Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Anantapur - 515003, A.P, India Abstract CdO thin films doped with different concentrations of chromium were deposited on mica substrates by DC reactive magnetron sputtering method. The effect of Cr concentration (1% to 5%) on structural, electrical and optical properties of CdO films was investigated. The structural studies reveal that the films are polycrystalline with preferred orientation along (1 1 1) plane. From the FESEM micrographs, it was clearly seen that all the films have smooth and homogeneous surface morphology. The optical transmittance of 72 % and minimum resistivity of 5.36 x 10 -4 Ω.cm is obtained for 4% Cr doped CdO thin films. The optical band gap of Cr doped CdO thin films increases from 2.72 to 2.81 eV with the increase of Cr concentration due to Burstein-Moss effect. The optical constants such as absorption coefficient (α), extinction coefficient (k) and refractive index (n) were determined from the optical transmission data. ©2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Conference Committee Members of 5th International Conference of Materials Processing and Characterization (ICMPC 2016). Keywords:Thin Films; Sputtering; X-ray diffraction; Electrical properties; Optical properties. 1. Introduction Nanostructured materials exhibiting high electrical conductivity, optical transparency and that can be grown efficiently as thin films are used extensively for variety of applications such as photovoltaic solar cells, phototransistors, photodiodes, gas sensors, antireflection coatings, etc.[1-3]. Cadmium oxide (CdO) thin films