This paper presents a review of current research activities on ZnO nanorods (or nanowires). We begin this paper with a variety of physical and chemical methods that have been used to synthesize ZnO nanorods (or nanowires). There follows a discussion of techniques for fabricating aligned arrays, heterostructures and doping of ZnO nanorods. At the end of this paper, we discuss a wide range of interesting properties such as luminescence, field emission, gas sensing and electron transport, associated with ZnO nanorods, as well as various intriguing applications. We conclude with personal remarks on the outlook for research on ZnO nanorods.

Because of the direct band gap of 4.9 eV, β-Ga2O3 has been considered as an ideal material for solar-blind photodetection without any bandgap tuning. Practical applications of the photodetectors require fast response speed, high signal-to-noise ratio, low energy consumption and low fabrication cost. Unfortunately, most reported β-Ga2O3-based photodetectors usually possess a relatively long response time. In addition, the β-Ga2O3 photodetectors based on bulk, the individual 1D nanostructure, and the film often suffer from the high cost, the low repeatability, and the relatively large dark current, respectively. In this paper, a Au/β-Ga2O3 nanowires array film vertical Schottky photodiode is successfully fabricated by a simple thermal partial oxidation process. The device exhibits a very low dark current of 10 pA at -30 V with a sharp cutoff at 270 nm. More interestingly, the 90-10% decay time of our device is only around 64 μs, which is much quicker than any other previously reported β-Ga2O3-based photodetectors. Besides, the self-powering, the excellent stability and the good reproducibility of Au/β-Ga2O3 nanowires array film photodetector are helpful to its commercialization and practical applications.

A facile pulse laser ablation approach for preparing black titanium oxide nanospheres, which could be used as photocatalysts under visible light, is proposed. The black titanium oxide nanospheres are prepared by pulsed-laser irradiation of pure titanium oxide in suspended aqueous solution. The crystalline phases, morphology, and optical properties of the obtained nanospheres are characterized by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), selected area electron diffraction (SAED), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and UV-vis-NIR diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. It is shown that high-energy laser ablation of titanium oxide suspended solution benefited the formation of Ti(3+) species and surface disorder on the surface of the titanium oxide nanospheres. The laser-modified black titanium oxide nanospheres could absorb the full spectrum of visible light, thus exhibiting good photocatalytic performance under visible light.