Tuning the Transparency Window of SrVO₃ Transparent Conducting Oxide

Correlated transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) have gained great attention, because of their unique combination of transparency and metallic character. SrVO₃ (SVO) was identified as a high-performance TCO in the visible range. Few studies have investigated band structure engineering through chemical doping to enhance the optical properties of SVO. Here, we use two different strategies by exploiting the band-filling and width of the bands derived from Vanadium to tune the screened plasma frequency ω_<i>p</i>^* and the interband transition <i>E</i>_{<i>p</i>-<i>d</i>} energy, corresponding to the optical transparency window edges. For control of the band-filling strategy, it is found that Titanium doped SVO has a wide transparency window, but such a composition does not maintain the high electrical conductivity required for TCO applications. Concerning the bandwidth strategy, the doping of SrVO₃ by Calcium shows that ω_<i>p</i>^* remains located in the IR range (1.12 eV), while <i>E</i>_{<i>p</i>-<i>d</i>} is blue-shifted into the UV region (3.43 eV) due to reinforced electronic correlations. By an appropriate choice of dopant, we successfully increased the size of the transparency window by around 11% from 1.94 eV (SVO) to 2.30 eV (Calcium-doped SVO), while retaining high conductivity of around 2.30 × 10⁴ (S·cm^-1) and high charge carrier density of 2.93 × 10²² cm^-3.