Growth of single crystal ZnO nanorods on GaN using an aqueous solution method

Abstract

Uniformly distributed ZnO nanorods with diameter 80–120nm and 2μm long have been grown at low temperatures on gallium nitride (GaN) by using the inexpensive aqueous solution method. The formation of the ZnO nanorods and the growth parameters are controlled by reactant concentration, temperature and pH. No catalyst is required. The x-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies show that the ZnO nanorods are single crystals and they grow along the c axis of the crystal plane. The room temperature photoluminescence (PL) measurements have shown ultraviolet peaks at 388nm with high intensity, which are comparable to those found in high quality ZnO films. The mechanism of the nanorod growth in the aqueous solution is also proposed.

One-dimensional ZnO nanostructures: Solution growth and functional properties

“…Due to a small lattice mismatch, almost perfectly vertically aligned ZnO nanowire arrays can be grown on GaN (n-type [48] and p-type [145][146][147][148][149]), AlN, SiC, Al 2 O 3 , and MgAl 2 O 4 substrates [150], either by hydrothermal decomposition [151] or electrodeposition. In particular, ZnO and GaN have the same wurtzite-type structure with a low lattice mismatch of 1.8% [152], which is much smaller than that (12.7%) with Au(111).…”

Growth, microstructure, UV and orange pink emission from ZnO nanocones

“…ZnO was prepared by a wet chemical method using dilute (0.027 M) zinc acetate aqueous solution as a precursor [19]. A highly alkaline environment (pH$10) was created by adding ammonia solution and ultrasonification.…”

Nanowire formation under femtosecond laser radiation in liquid

“…Some of the physical methods include the thermal evaporation and vapor transport approaches (Huang et al, 2001a;Pan et al, 2001), metal organic vapor-phase epitaxial growth (Park et al, 2002), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) (Heo et al, 2002) and pulsed laser deposition (PLD) (Zhang et al, 2005), which are generally based on catalysed vapor-liquid-solid growth mechanism (Wagner & Ellis, 1964). In addition, the simple and low-cost chemical aqueous solution processing with hydrothermal treatments have also been thoroughly studied (Le et al, 2005;Yang et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2002a;Zhang et al, 2002b;. However, all these processes require either high temperature, low pressure, complex procedures, extended growth period or the use of catalysts that could be embedded on the nanostructure tip, which are unfavourable conditions.…”