Authors’ contributions XW and XX proposed the research work, coordinated the collaboration, carried out the analyses of experimental results, and drafted the manuscript.

JH designed the experiment and experimental setup and carried out the measurements. RZ and MS participated in experimental measurements, results and discussion, and analyses. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background ZnO is a low-cost and widely used semiconductor material with outstanding physical and chemical characteristics. At room temperature, the band gap and exciton binding energy of ZnO are 3.37 eV and 60 meV, respectively, both contributing to its extraordinary chemical and thermal stability. Thus, ZnO thin films exhibit magnificent applications in the manufacturing process of optoCB-839 nmr electronic devices [1]. Also, being a promising semiconductor material that is transparent to visible light and has AR-13324 in vitro excellent optical transmittance, TiO2 is widely used in the synthesis of semiconductor photocatalysts, solar cell electrodes, and sophisticated electronic optical devices [2–5]. ZnO and TiO2 thin films, both with a wide band gap, high refractive index, high stability, and good catalysis, are suitable partners for multilayer nanostructures. On the one hand, TiO2 could serve as a buffer layer between ZnO and Si substrates. The lattice and thermal mismatches can be reduced,

and the quality of ZnO films will be JIB04 ic50 enhanced because TiO2 can inhibit the surface silicon atoms from plundering oxygen atoms in ZnO films [6, 7]. Moreover, growing very thin ZnO films over a porous TiO2 electrode can improve the surface state and surface atomic mobility, so high-powered solar cells with better utilization efficiency PIK3C2G can be produced [8]. There are also researches on ZnO/TiO2 multilayer

mirrors at ‘water-window’ wavelengths with high reflectivity around 2.7 nm, indicating its potential in multilayer optics [9]. ZnO/TiO2 multilayers have been prepared by many techniques, such as chemical vapor deposition, pulsed laser deposition, and co-sputtering [10–12]. However, high-quality nanolaminate films require precisely controlled factors including interfacial roughness, interdiffusion between layers, layer-to-layer consistency, and conformality. Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is more powerful in preparing such multilayers than other techniques, which keeps the precursors separated during the reaction [13]. By sequentially dosing the surface with appropriate chemical precursors and then promoting surface reactions that are inherently self-limiting, the atomic layer control of film growth can be obtained. There has been a variety of publications on ALD-prepared ZnO or TiO2 films [14–17]. Thus, studies on ZnO/TiO2 multilayers prepared by ALD are of increasing importance in this field [18, 19]. In this study, a series of ZnO/TiO2 nanolaminates were prepared by ALD.