Liquid-phase fabrication of nanostructured zinc oxide

Abstract

As one of the most important nanomaterials in fundamental research and technological applications, nanostructured zinc oxide has recently attracted considerable interest due to its wide band gap of 3.37 eV and large excitation binding energy of 60 meV. We have developed a novel liquid-phase method for fabricating well-aligned ZnO nanorod arrays on arbitrary substrates such as zinc substrates and ZnO film-coated substrates (e.g. glass, silicon, and polymer). This novel synthetic approach also allows reducing the growth temperature to 65 oC, leading to an effective and low-cost fabrication process for high-quality ZnO nanorod arrays. This substrate-independent preparation of ZnO nanorod arrays on patterned substrates enables a wide variety of potential applications in electronic and optoelectronic fields. Additionally, large-scale dense arrays of well-aligned hexagonal ZnO nanotubes were grown on zinc foils and a competitive growth mechanism is proposed.