Abstract
Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) with the functionality of transparency plus conductivity lie at the center of many technological applications. Commonly used TCOs are -type. However, the performances of -type TCOs lag far behind their -type counterparts and the development of high-performance -type TCOs remains an arduous challenge. The electron correlation due to on-site Coulomb interaction in the correlated metal oxides can not only promote modification of the valence band, which forms the basis for -type conduction, but also shift the screened plasma energy to below the visible region for enhancing optical transparency. In this paper, the electron correlation is utilized as a key material design parameter to improve the performance of -type TCOs. This approach is experimentally verified by decreasing electron correlation from to , which, despite its high hole concentration (), has low screened plasma energy (approximately 0.97 eV) and significantly boosts the performance through good balance between the electrical conductivity and optical transparency. These results indicate that the strategy of electron correlation engineering paves an effective way for exploring high-performance -type TCOs in strongly correlated oxides.
1 More- Received 11 June 2019
- Revised 9 September 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.12.044035
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