Corrigendum to “An insight of Mg doped ZnO thin films: A comparative experimental and first-principle investigations”(Physica E: Low-dimensional Systems and Nanostructures, (2020), 115, C, (113658), (S1386947719303200), 10.1016/j.physe.2019.113658)

The authors regret an error in the original version of the article. A post-publication review of the experimental data and figures by a third party in early 2026 identified two issues in the published article. First, Figure 3 (SEM characterization) contained an error in figure assembly resulting in an incorrect panel representation. Second, Figure 7 (optical band gap analysis) was generated using an incorrect Tauc plot extrapolation procedure, leading to inaccurate optical band gap values. The original UV–Visible data were subsequently recovered and reanalyzed, while the original archived SEM micrographs corresponding to the affected panel could not be retrieved. Section 4.2 “Surface morphology”, containing and including Fig. 3, should be disregarded and removed from the article. Section 5.1 “Ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy” and Fig. 7 should be corrected as given below.(Figure presented) 5.1. Ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy The optical band gap of pure and Mg-doped ZnO is calculated using Tauc's relation [44]:(8)αhυ=B(hυ−Eg)nwhere hυ is the energy of an incident photon (in eV), α is the absorption coefficient, B is a constant that depends on the transition and E_g is the optical band gap of the semiconductor. For a direct transition n = 1/2. Fig. 7 shows the variation in band gap that was obtained from (αhυ)² versus hυ plots by extrapolating the linear portion of the curves [(αhυ)² as a function of hυ] to intercept the energy axis (x-axis) for pure and Mg-doped ZnO. The calculated band gap is 3.303 eV for pure ZnO and 3.778 eV and 3.945 eV for 0.1 and 0.3 wt% Mg-doped ZnO, respectively, which is in close agreement with the literature values [49,50]. It is clearly indicated that the band gap energy (E_g) increases as the doping concentration of Mg increased. These results suggest that the spectrum has a blue shift due to the Mg concentration. The increase in band gap can be correlated to new defects created in the structure that may be introduced by substitution of Mg atoms as a result of the electronegativity and ionic radius difference between Zn and Mg. The difference in electronegativities of Zn and Mg atoms may induce an attractive effect of interaction between Mg²⁺ and O²⁻, which may lead to a rise in band gap energy because bulk MgO possesses a band gap energy of 7.8 eV, while nanosized MgO has band gap of 5.0–6.2 eV [51,52]. A blue shift was observed in our study that may also be linked with radiative recombination of excitons [45]. This correction does not affect the scientific conclusions and interpretation of the results presented in the article. The corrected optical band gap values preserve the same trend reported in the original manuscript and remain consistent with the verified XRD results and the first-principles (DFT) calculations. The removal of Figure 3 and the associated SEM discussion does not affect the principal findings of the study. All authors have reviewed and agreed to this correction. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.