Alternative Doping Techniques

Provided that morphology does not change. The dependences on component potential and doping have to be discussed analogously. 5 An alternative technique uses guard rings.289... 

Purification is often required for the beads obtained by the techniques described above since undesired substances such as surfactants, coupling agents, etc. need to be removed. This is also valid for dye molecules noncovalently adsorbed on the surface of the beads since they usually have different properties (sensitivity, cross-talk to other analytes, leaching, etc.) compared to the molecules located in the core. The dye-doped beads can be purified by repeated precipitation which is achieved by adding salts (typically sodium chloride). In certain cases (typically for large beads) the addition of salts is not necessary so that the beads can be isolated by centrifugation. Washing with ethanol often helps remove lipophilic dye molecules adsorbed on the surface provided that the polymer is not swellable. Alternatively, dialysis can be useful especially if a hydrophilic water-soluble indicator is covalently coupled to the bead surface. 

A promising alternative is surface textured doped zinc oxide films. ZnO films can offer excellent transparency and are highly resistant to hydrogen plasmas [78]. Textured ZnO films have been prepared by several deposition techniques. Examples are boron doped zinc oxide (ZnO B) prepared by low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) ([79,80], see also Chap. 6) or ZnO films deposited by expanding thermal plasma CVD [81], Quite recently, ZnO films for back contacts of solar modules have been developed using chemical bath deposition [82]. 

A comparison of Fig. 5.12 and the defect density in Fig. 5.9 shows that the total density of the band tail electrons - neutral donors plus occupied intrinsic band tail states-is about ten times less than the density of deep defects induced by the doping. This is a remarkable result because it implies that almost all the donors are compensated by deep defects. However, before considering the consequences of this observation, it is helpful to discuss an alternate experimental technique for measuring the density of shallow electrons or holes, because of the possibility that ESR is missing some of the carriers due to electron pairing or broadening of the resonance. 

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