https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/s10051-025-00995-2
Regular Article - Solid State and Materials
Adaptive learning of prediction and simulation on the influence of Fe thickness on the energy gap of ZnO/Fe/ZnO tri-layer thin films
1
Department of Physics, Faculty of Education, Ain Shams University, 11566, Cairo, Egypt
2
Department of Solid-State Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Debrecen, 4026, Debrecen, Hungary
3
Department of Environmental Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Debrecen, 4002, Debrecen, Hungary
Received:
28
October
2024
Accepted:
25
June
2025
Published online:
21
July
2025
This work focuses on the investigation of the effect of Iron (Fe) interlayer thickness, on the experimental, simulation and prediction of the optical energy gap of ZnO/Fe/ZnO tri-layer thin films. The optical properties and the modeling were studied by varying the Fe interlayer thickness from 20 to 80 nm. The tri-layer thin films were successfully fabricated using atomic layer deposition for the ZnO layers and direct current magnetron sputtering unit for Fe layers. The optical transmission in the range of 400–2500 nm has been studied to determine the variation of absorption coefficient (α) and optical gap 
of the investigated thin films. The appearance of ZnO/Fe/ZnO system as a Fabry–Pérot “interference filter” is consistent with the optical transmission curves. Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) was utilized for simulation and prediction based on experimental data. Using ANFIS enabled the prediction of the transmittance of different Fe interlayer thicknesses for the unmeasured values. The Eg, showed a noticeable dependence on the Fe layer thickness, where a significant reduction decreasing from 2.45 to 1.75 eV was observed, which has been attributed to the increase of the metallicity, while the metallization criterion on the basis of Eg showed a decreasing trend from 0.35 to 0.312, which suggests potential applications for nonlinear optics. The evaluating mean squared error of the ANFIS model was indicating the positive influence of the used model. Therefore, modeling approach has computational efficiency and flexibility that provides a rapid and reliable technique to investigate the impact of Fe thickness on the energy gap of ZnO/Fe/ZnO tri-layer thin films.
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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
