Selective patterned growth of ZnO nanowires/nanosheets and their photoluminescence properties

Abstract

Zinc oxide (ZnO) demonstrates promising applications in photocatalysis, photodetectors and light-emitting devices. The shape of the ZnO nanoparticles plays an important role in determining their mechanical and optical properties. Here we report facile and controllable synthesis of ZnO nanowires and nanosheets with hydrothermal synthesis on patterned aluminum substrates prepared by colloidal lithography. The nanowire areas and nanosheet areas were well-defined in micron scale and they displayed dramatically different photoluminescence properties: while nanowires showed strong band-edge emission at 382 nm with a moderate orange emission at 600 nm, nanosheets only showed broad and intense green emission in the 547 nm range. The method demonstrated here enables periodic ZnO nanowire/nanosheet patterning with well-controlled morphology and luminescence property, which would provide a large-scale facile fabrication technique to tailor the substrate’s optical properties by using ZnO as the only constituent oxide component.