Fabrication of ZnO photonic amorphous diamond nanostructure from parrot feathers for modulated photoluminescence properties

Abstract

A ZnO photonic amorphous diamond nanostructure was successfully synthesised using a feather barb of the Rosy-Faced Lovebird as supporting template via a facile sol-gel process. Different from ordered structures, an isotropic PBG around 500 nm was evidenced from reflectance spectra and an optical metallurgical microscopy image, which overlaps with the visible emission peak of ZnO. As a result, the inhibition of visible emission inside the PBG and the enhancement of UV emission at the PBG edges have both been observed, which is independent from the incident angle. Moreover, the rapid thermal annealing can also help improve the crystallinity of ZnO and raise the UV/visible emission ratio without affecting the structure. These results can be very useful for the study of the modification of the optical emission properties of ZnO and other semiconductor materials as well as research on ZnO random lasing.