Abstract
Owing to the very brittle nature of tellurium powder, nanoscopic grains with an average size of 4.8 ± 0.8 nm were produced by dry vibration milling technique using a mixer/mill apparatus. A novel material was obtained by binding the nanosized tellurium grains with poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) polymer. The morphology, elemental composition, and structural and optical properties of Te/PMMA films were investigated. The prepared material was composed of hexagonal tellurium and α-phase of tellurium oxide. The electrical properties of the films were studied, for different electrode contact configurations, in dark condition and under white light illumination varying the optical power density from 2 to 170 mW/cm2 and turning the light on and off cyclically. Data analysis shows that the photoconductivity of the film with sandwich contact configuration is a linear function of the light power density and increases more than 2 orders of magnitude as compared to the photoresponse of the film with coplanar contact configuration.
Highlights
Elemental tellurium is a p-type semiconductor that can be exploited for many technological applications in metallurgy, photovoltaics, photonics, electronics, and medicine [1]
Structural and Morphological Analysis scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) measurements on Te powder samples were carried out to verify the ability of dry vibration milling technique to produce nanoscopic Te powder for the fabrication of Te/poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) films
Data analysis indicates the presence of oxygen, due to the dry-milling process performed in air that can lead to a partial oxidation of the tellurium grain surface, and traces of iron, which is already present in the starting coarse tellurium powder
Summary
Elemental tellurium is a p-type semiconductor that can be exploited for many technological applications in metallurgy, photovoltaics, photonics, electronics, and medicine [1]. It has been used in the form of thin films or powder to fabricate gas sensors [2, 3], antiseptic materials [4], photoconductors [5,6,7], thermoelectric devices [8,9,10,11], etc. Zhu et al [21] presented an ultrasonic-assisted solutionphase approach for the fabrication of tellurium bundles of nanowhiskers, Sen et al [22] synthesized Te nanostructures by physical vapor deposition, and Vasileiadis et al demonstrated that a controlled fabrication of Te nanotubes can be carried out by irradiating bulk elemental Te with continuous wave lasers emitting in visible range for short exposure time [23]
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